Wallanza

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...