The honest answer about blue wallpaper in a dark room is that it works, but only if you put it on the wall the daylight reaches last. We tried it the other way round first, and the room looked like a basement. The room was a 12 by 14 foot living room facing north, one window on the long wall, flat gray paint everywhere. The gray read cold all day and dead by four in the afternoon. The owners had already repainted twice, each time a little warmer, and each time the room looked the same. What the room was doing wrong Flat gray on four walls gave the eye nothing to land on. In a north-facing room the light arrives flat and even, with almost no shadow, so a single flat color has no texture to catch. The result is a room that looks unfinished at noon and gloomy by dusk. The second problem was the chimney breast. It stuck out about nine inches from the back wall and was painted the same gray, so the one piece of architecture in the room disappeared. The choice we argued about The first insti...
Pick underwater wallpaper by the light in the room and by the height of the main motif, not by how the design looks on a phone screen. A pale reef pattern goes flat in a north-facing room, and a deep open-water scene shrinks a small one. Ocean themes get chosen on impulse more than almost any other subject. They photograph well, then they arrive and the blue is heavier than anyone expected, or the fish sit at eye level in a way nobody noticed in a thumbnail. Here is the order I would work in, with the measuring parts first, because that is where the money goes wrong. Decide which wall is doing the work Only one wall in a room should hold a scene. In a bedroom that is almost always the wall behind the bed, because you never look at it while you are lying in it, so a busy reef stays restful. In a child's room it is more often the wall the desk or the play mat faces, since being looked at is the whole point. Stand in the doorway, notice where your eye lands first, and treat that as th...