chinoiserie

I have a small second spare guest room that is languishing at the top of the house, and one that tended to get used as a dumping ground for all the things I mean to sort out one day, but never get around to doing. I needed to make it dual purpose as both a room with a piano for my daughter to practice in, (thanks to my godaughter who has lent us one…) and also as a workable spare room.

The room is in the eaves of the house, so it has an angled ceiling and walls, and a dormer window. It has always been a cream and pale blue scheme, with patterned sisal carpet. There is a cunning daybed which opens out either into 2 x singles or into a double, (and this is only used at Christmas and Easter when relatives overflow, as we have another larger guest room for visitors to use throughout the year).

The shelves made it really cluttered to add a piano into the mix, so I had a serious purge and cleared them all out and removed the shelves. I then worked around the existing carpet, bed, artwork and chest of drawers to come up with a new scheme that was fresher and more spacious. I wanted to keep the paintings which are by family members, they already have a blue theme in their colours, plus beautiful maple and gilded frames.

The mission:

To spend as little as possible on raw materials, and to refresh the room using whatever I had lying around the house. I did a rough moodboard to keep my mind focused.

Decorating:

I found a great wallpaper called ‘Charlotte‘ to use on the back wall where the shelves once stood. It is a light blue paisley on white and cost only £18 a roll from B&Q, plus it is paste the wall paper which is amazing, (first time I have used paste the wall paper and it is SO easy). It took less than an hour to whack it up and I only needed one roll. I then repainted the remaining walls in First Dawn by Dulux, which is pretty much an exact match for the pale blue used in the wallpaper. The woodwork was all repainted in Farrow and Ball’s Wimborne White, which is quite a bright white for them. The room instantly looked fresher, brighter and bigger.

Total cost: £56.41

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De Gournay paper and murals from the masters of the most exquisite wallpaper hand made by artisans has always been Number 1 on my dream list for decorating a room, (or Gracie Studios as a close second as well). However, you do usually pay a small fortune for hand painted wallpaper and murals on silk or paper, and so it has always been out of my reach, and I am not sure my own artistic skills would match the pieces I have seen if I tried to replicate it, (actually definitely not when I think about it).

All Photos from De Gournay

I love the way the paintings meander over the walls, around corners and are so obviously not normal wallpaper. These papers cost literally hundreds per roll. A friend purchased a roll a couple of years ago, and hung it like a painting rather than stick it to a wall directly in case she moved house and had to leave it behind.

But, GOOD NEWS, I have just found a supplier of Chinoiserie papers in China (via my lovely friend that is Ebay) that has good recommendations via Jenny Komenda at the Little Green Notebook blog. They can paint onto paper or silk so you have a choice of medium. Jenny had some panels from them with the backgrounds specifically matched to a paint sample she sent them, and the results are stunning. Jenny framed hers as separate panels in acrylic, however I think I would go the whole hog and use them as wallpaper directly in alcoves, and match the background colour paint to the colour on the rest of the walls. The room would then have the hand painted sections in the alcoves, and if you used 2 panels per alcove they could curl around onto the adjacent walls. Scrummy.

Here is the link to the ebay store where they can be found. They cost approximately £237 for an 8ft high x 3ft wide panel which is quite a lot less than one roll by De Gournay.

Definitely an option worth investigating further, and not much difference in costs to using a designer wallpaper all over the room from design houses like Colefax & Fowler, Prestigious Wallcoverings or House of Hackney.