…That is the question. It’s a scary thought, so we’ll say it quietly, but in only a few short weeks you’ll be putting up the Christmas decorations again. Which means that, right now, you’re probably facing the same decor dilemma you face every year.

You know there’s a room (or two) that need redecorating but do you do it now, and then mask the lot with baubles and glitter, or do you wait and do it all in the new year?

In true fence-sitting style, we think the answer is ‘it depends’. It depends on whether you’re planning to festoon the room with Christmas decorations and, if you are, it depends how likely they are to damage the decor.

Hold on…

If hanging your decorations is likely to demand much drilling, sticking or other invasive work then it makes sense to wait. There’s little point in making a mess of your brand new wallpaper for the sake of a few weeks.

Act now…

But there is a drawback to this plan. If your wallpaper is looking tired and in need of a refresh now, just think how it will look once you take the decorations down. Hanging Christmas decorations won’t remove the problem. At best they’ll hide it for a few weeks. At worst a tired room will still look tired – only with a bit more tinsel.

So, if your room won’t be given the full Christmas treatment, or the decorations can be hung without damaging the decor, start that wallpapering now. You’ll then have a glorious new canvas against which you can dress the room for Christmas. And that will bring a whole new life to your decorations as well as your room.

If you’re planning to redecorate, why not take some inspiration from the time of year and opt for the shimmer and sheen of glitter?

It’s not just at Christmas that a burst of glitter can bring glamour to your wallpaper. These examples contain seams of sparkling silver and golden material that catch the light and add life and texture to your wall.

In a light room they reflect that light, bouncing it around the room in new, unexpected ways. In rooms without a great deal of natural light they bring added depth, reflecting the light from each lamp with subtlety and elegance.

You’ll also notice a marked difference in the way these wallpapers perform depending on the time of day. During daylight hours they give the room a calm, sophisticated sheen; by night they truly come to life, revealing hidden richness and luxury.

Redecorate now and you’ll find the glittering golden shades provide a glorious backdrop to your Christmas decorations. Yet these are so much more than wallpapers for winter. Come spring and summer you’ll be finding the room takes on a whole new identity, bringing energy and fizz to your indoors.

Thinking of redecorating? Don’t forget to add a bit of sparkle.

According to recent reports, house prices are about to take a significant lurch upwards whilst interest rates drop to further record lows. If you have a little equity to play with, putting your house on the market may be about to look a lot more attractive than it has in recent times.

Since you’re unlikely to be the only one to think this way it will be more important than ever to ensure your home looks at its best when those prospective buyers come to call – and that means taking a long hard look at your decor and making some changes that will help your house sell. But when it comes to updating your wallpaper with a view to selling, which strategy will you adopt?

Go neutral

The staple advice from a wealth of early noughties makeover shows was ‘go neutral’. The thinking behind this was it’s a lot easier to imagine your own design over a blank canvas than it is to see past a garish colour scheme.

Certainly, if your colour choices are retina-scorchingly vivid that advice still stands, but replacing your feature wallpaper with something more neutral isn’t necessarily the way to go anymore.

We all took the ‘go neutral’ advice to heart so well that most homes will adopt the same approach. And if everyone’s decor looks the same then it’s an awful lot more difficult to stand out.

Show the contemporary possibilities

Showing what’s possible with a contemporary wallpaper is the alternative route. Providing you choose something relatively mainstream you’re unlikely to offend too many people, and the ones that love the look will be able to see the house in a modern, contemporary way you just can’t achieve by painting everything magnolia.

Choosing a bold feature wall can transform a viewer into a buyer

Do something

Whichever approach you adopt, the clearest message has to be this: do something. We all put up with the marks, scuffs and scrapes that accumulate on our walls after a few years of family living – we scarcely even notice them. But prospective buyers will – so it’s worth updating you wallpaper to revitalise your home, and increase those chances of a sale.

We all lead busy lives. Chances are you’re trying to snatch a few minutes decorating time whilst running the kids to swimming, fixing dinner and being annoyed by cold callers. And when you’re in a rush, or your attention’s elsewhere, it’s easy to let the odd thing slip.

It is, for example, easy to forget to give your paint or wallpaper the time it needs to dry properly. You’re in a rush. The wallpaper, you figure, should notice this and respond accordingly. Except it doesn’t – and if you thunder on without giving your paint and wallpaper time to dry you’ll end up having to do it again, or live with an end result that’s less than you hoped for.

So, here are Wallpaper Central’s top drying-related tips:

1. Read the instructions

Certain factors can help speed up the drying process (see below), but to be sure your wallpaper’s dry follow the instructions on the pack.

2. If it’s still wet, don’t touch it

Try and put a second coat of paint over a wet first coat and you’ll only succeed in making a mess of your work so far.

Try to paint a wallpaper that’s still drying and you’ll find the weight of the paint lifts the paper up in certain areas, giving you a wall that’s bubblier than a convention of kids’ TV presenters. As the paste dries many of the lumps and bumps may settle – but there’s no guarantee.

You’ll know your wallpaper’s dry when a) you’ve left it for the time stated in the instructions, b) it doesn’t feel damp; and c) it’s roughly the same shade as the wallpaper that’s still on the roll (damp wallpaper tends to look darker).

3. Open a window

Fresh air can really help the drying process. You should, of course, have already opened a window to aid ventilation, but if you haven’t do it now. Circulating air will help paint and wallpaper dry quicker, although the effects are much less pronounced on damp, cold days.

4. Don’t turn on the heating

We know. When you just want your wallpaper to dry the temptation is to turn the heating on full blast. And it will dry your wallpaper out. Trouble is, it will dry it too quickly and as it dries all those carefully matched edges will start to pull apart, leaving you with stripes you hadn’t expected.

Turn the heating off in any room you start to decorate – and don’t turn it on again until everything’s dry.

Summer’s over, so it’s time to give the living room a long overdue autumnal refresh. As ever, the first task is to clear the room of clutter, and that includes the pictures, mirrors and other paraphernalia we hang on our walls. And as ever, removing them reveals a rather shocking sight.

The wallpaper that has sat covered for years looks as fresh as the day it was first hung (well, aside from the odd cobweb). The paper around it, though, is thrown into sharp relief. It has been in frequent full sunlight and suddenly looks faded and pale, a shadow of its former self. Where did all that colour go? Is there something we could Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no point being timid with that feature wall. It’s called ‘feature’ for a reason. It needs to stand out, be bold and striking. It needs to be both focal point and talking point. Designer Sophie Conran understands that – but then she would. She’s spent a lifetime in design.

If the surname seems familiar it’s because Sophie is the daughter of Habitat founders Sir Terence Conran and Caroline Herbert. A childhood spent absorbing their innate design skills couldn’t help but inspire Sophie – yet her work has proved even more eclectic than her father’s.

From cookery books to cutlery, chocolate to china, Sophie’s inimitable design style and energy fill her work with passion and punch. As she states on her website, Sophie’s work is all about “creating a beautiful world around you.” It’s an ethic that is certainly true of her wallpaper.

These Bohemia wallpapers virtually leap off the wall, yet the etched design gives depth and substance. In larger rooms these wallpapers make a dramatic, unconventional choice suitable for all walls. In smaller areas use them to create feature walls of real power.

Sophie describes the Bohemia design as being “an injection of joy.” And who are we to argue?

How do you react when it’s time to start wallpapering? For some, decorating is therapeutic. Others relish the challenge. And for some, facing a day filled with wallpaper is likely to send them into a cold sweat.

But no matter how you approach your wallpapering there’s one bit of the process that always taxes even the most accomplished decorator – and that’s those fiddly cuts around sockets, sills, shelves and the other fixtures that tend to get in the way of a simple, straight drop of wallpaper.

In wallpapering, the sharper the blade the better. Making delicate, precision cuts using an old blade with the cutting edge of a spoon isn’t going to make life easy for you.

Instead, use a Stanley knife or similar decorator’s blade like this one.

Push the blade into the wallpaper to ensure you’re cutting through all the layers and carefully drag the blade in a smooth, single motion. The sharper your blade, the less chance of the wallpaper rippling and tearing as you cut. Don’t worry if you score a little too deep and catch the plaster beneath the wallpaper, but be aware that the more you do this the quicker the blade will lose its sharp edge. Don’t be afraid to change blades frequently to keep your cutting edge sharp, and your delicate cuts sharper still.

And do please remember to be careful when using, changing and disposing of blades:

• Always wear safety goggles when making cuts, in case a blade breaks
• Always wear safety gloves when changing blades
• Always wrap discarded blades so they can’t cause injury
• Keep any sharp objects in a toolbox or similar when not in use, so they can’t cause injury to you or anyone else

Here at Wallpaper Central we’ve had a bit of a busman’s holiday recently. Instead of looking at wallpaper all day at work, we’ve been applying it at home. Having finished a particularly tricky wall, with lots of fiddly cutting around sockets and odd-shaped corners, we took a moment to step back and admire our handiwork. We were feeling rather pleased with ourselves until someone muttered the immortal words: “Is this bit supposed to be like this?”

There’s nothing like someone scouring a wall for the slightest air-bubble to pop your own bubble of wallpapering pride. But that got us thinking: surely this wasn’t the first time this wallpaper had been scrutinised. And we were right: it wasn’t.

Testing times

When a new wallpaper is manufactured it must undergo a series of tests. The tests differ depending on the type of paper but included amongst the tests will be tensile strength, tear strength, flame spread, shrinkage and adhesion.

Each test is designed to ensure the wallpaper will act like a wallpaper should when you’re applying it, stay on the wall for a reasonable length of time without dropping to bits, and offer some level of resistance (or at least not act as an accelerant) in the event of a fire.

Once the wallpaper is approved for production the checking continues. Each wallpaper company carries out visual checks to ensure print quality is up to scratch, and woven backings are checked for thread count.

Each individual batch is checked for variances in shading or colour before the larger production roll is chopped into smaller rolls of wallpaper ready for stores – and our wall.

It takes dozens of individual checks to bring a wallpaper from design stage to decorating. And yet its toughest test is still a 9 year old with a knack for spotting air bubbles.

Sit back for a moment and take a look at the room around you. If it’s wallpapered, then consider that it’s taken almost 2000 years, some nasty diseases and an unhealthy dose of arsenic to reach the point where you can enjoy your wallpaper without a) going bankrupt; and b) dying. Fabulous wallpaper, it seems, has a rather less fabulous past…

The Egyptians were the first to develop papyrus but it was the Chinese who first put their rice paper on the walls in around 200BC. By AD105 they had refined the practice by using rags instead of paper and the first wallpapers of the sort we might recognise today were introduced.

In the UK, the oldest known example of wallpaper comes from Christ’s College, Cambridge, during the reign of Henry VIII, and features a pomegranate design created with a woodcut.

Wallpaper, or ‘stained paper’ as it was alternatively known, was prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest households. Until 1802 wallpaper could only be printed in small squares which meant that a lot of labour was required to create the wallpaper in the first place, and even more was needed to apply it to the wall. The Countess of Suffolk spent £42 wallpapering one room in the 1750s when the average cost of a house was £12.

The introduction of a wallpaper tax in 1712 made wallpaper even more expensive unless you were crafty. The tax applied only to stained or coloured papers, so for 100 years or so there arose a healthy trade in decorating rooms in plain paper to avoid the tax, and then stencilling the paper by hand once it was in place.

Manufacturing wallpaper was an unhealthy business. There appears to have been little concern over where the rags that were mulched down came from, leaving labourers with an impressive collection of diseases.

Once the wallpaper tax was abolished in the 19^th Century, wallpaper became even more dangerous. As the price dropped, so more homes suddenly discovered the delights of the most fashionable wallpapers. The most fashionable papers were green, and the green that was most desired was created using arsenic. In damp houses (i.e. most of them) this created a faint garlic odour that was the telltale sign of arsenic in the atmosphere. Arsenic poisoning probably accounted for countless cases of blindness, acute diabetes, neurological disorders and deaths.

It’s taken a lot of effort to reach a point where wallpaper can be enjoyed by everyone, inexpensively, and without harm to health. So take another look at those walls, and appreciate the true wonder of your new wallpaper.

References:

Bryson, Bill, At Home, A Short History of Private Life, Doubleday 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_poisoning

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/3305112/On-the-level-building-tax.html

http://www.wallpaperhowto.com/history.shtml

We’re a fickle bunch. We spend all year wishing for the sun to shine and the temperature to rise and when it finally does we complain it’s too hot and spend the rest of the day looking for ways to cool down.

Keeping cool doesn’t necessarily mean reaching for the nearest ice cream (although that works too). Colour can have a cooling effect – and no colour’s cooler than blue.

At Wallpaper Central, we’ve been searching for the finest cooling wallpapers around. And here are three classics:

Chloe by Arthouse (ref 253805) is a wallpaper encompassing a light blue background decorated with a white floral design.

We also love this bright white based, blue floral patterned wallpaper called Opium from Fine Decor (ref: 30298)

And finallywe have chosen another wallpaper from Fine Decor – Bromley (ref 13992)

Step from a sun drenched garden into a room with these fabulous wallpapers on the wall and you’ll instantly feel cooler. Of course you won’t actually be cooler but blue, just as with any other colour, creates certain psychological effects.

Blue is calming. It creates a reflective atmosphere and can increase the impression of space (but only with lighter shades). It reminds us of distance, the sea and the sky, and for all these reasons it’s the perfect colour to escape into on a blazing hot day.

So for year round comfort in rooms that catch the sun, consider cooling, calming blue.