A good kitchen wallpaper design answers a question before it answers a style brief: which parts of this room get wet, hot or greasy, and which parts never do. Most papered kitchens that fail, fail because nobody asked that first. The paper went on the most visible wall rather than the most suitable one. Here is what actually goes wrong, and four fixes for it. Why it goes wrong Three forces act on a printed surface in a kitchen, and only one of them is obvious. Fat is the first. Oil spits further than people expect, lands as a fine mist rather than visible spots, and builds a film that holds dust. Within a year the wall near a hob looks dull in a way that wiping does not solve. Steam is the second, and it does its damage at the edges. A seam or a cut-out near a kettle or a dishwasher vent takes repeated cycles of damp and dry, and eventually the edge lifts. Once one edge lifts, the rest follows. The third is the wall itself. Kitchens are the rooms most likely to have been patched, repai...
A damask wall covering lives or dies on the size of its repeat. The same ornament that looks composed on a wide dining wall can look like a printing fault on a narrow chimney breast, and the fix is almost never a different color. It is a different scale. Measure first, count how many whole motifs will land on the wall, and every other choice gets easier, including which damask wallpaper you end up ordering. Measure the wall before you look at any pattern Take the width at three heights and the height at three points along the width, because very few walls are true. Use the largest number in each direction. Then write down where every switch, socket, vent and window reveal sits, as a distance from the left edge and from the floor. A large ornament sliced in half by a light switch is the most common regret with a formal pattern, and it is avoidable entirely at the measuring stage. Keep the notes somewhere you will find them again. If you want the full method, including what to do with s...