A Guide to Wallcoverings

Clement Riviera:

In our industry, we always say wallpaper for everything, but there is a real separation.

Wallpapers are purchased as standard rolls of 70cm wide x 10m long.

Wallcoverings are made from natural fibres like linen, silk, or raffia. Generally, wallcoverings are 140cm wide and purchased by the metre. This format is akin to how you would order a drapery fabric, taking into account the joins and drops required.

Wall panels, murals, or panoramas are becoming increasingly popular. These repeatable scenes are 3m high x 2-3m wide. Advancements now allow designs to be printed onto natural fibres, resulting in 3m high x 3m wide repeatable scenes being digitally printed onto 100% linen.

Andy Pierre:

The quality has gone up incredibly since I started my apprenticeship in London in 1986. It was mainly papers which are much softer, much easier to damage, are more difficult to align, and the joins were never as nice.

Clement Riviera:

The technology in the industry has changed so much in the past decade. When I started 15-20 years ago, it was very difficult to remove wallpapers and the vinyl was quite plastic – now we have heavy vinyl, 100% linen fabrics, panoramas. Previously, if a book had 20 designs there would be one or two textured plains. Now we can create one book with 80 colours in the same texture.

Sarah Fox:

Wallcoverings are becoming like textiles – constantly in flux – which is why you every single year you see things you've never seen before. The evolution of the qualities, the colour palettes, the depth of the vinyl cut, and the array of specialized material finishes is immense.

Andy Pierre:

Old wallpapers were pasted while on the table, then you had to wait for them to stretch. The issue was if you let one stretch for four minutes and one stretch for five minutes, they drops will look very different when they’re hung. So, your pattern looks great in the middle, but not at the top or bottom.  

Modern papers generally require pasting the wall and then applying the paper. Because there is no stretching your pattern top-to-bottom is going to be perfect. So, these papers are easier to hang in a lot of ways. You've got to be more careful, but the quality of the finish and the join is always going to be much higher, and they come off much more easily as well.

Clement Riviera:

A very important point is that to remove the wallpaper, you just apply water, and it comes straight off – leaving your wall very smooth to reinstall immediately. Even large murals can be installed in 30 minutes.

Sarah Fox:

We find that clients fall into two camps; either they love the seam because “I can show people I’ve got the real deal,” or “It's going to drive me nuts, I'm going to see seams all over the hallway.”

Many vinyl wallpapers are embossed using a cylinder to replicate the texture of linen or sisal on the surface. You will sometimes see an instruction like ‘reverse hang’ – don't overthink it, talk to your installer – what the reverse hang does is make the repeating texture appear as an all over texture, helping to hide the join/seam.

However, there is, as we say in France, the crème de la crème of wallcoverings. These are natural fibre products such as sea grass, grass cloths, silk, or seashells. In these cases, seams are an opportunity to celebrate the material finishes. It's a way to show that you've chosen to put silk or sisal on the wall – it’s like linen curtains that puddle on the floor.

Andy Pierre:

It's not recommended. If it's a very old paper that is stubbornly stuck it may be okay, but what tends to happen is that any bubbles or damage to the old wallpaper will show through – however, it must be paper, it cannot be flocked or textured anaglypta.

Matthew Gray:

One of the nice things about wallpaper and being a wallpaper installer is that we’re not dealing with nasty chemicals. For most jobs we use a very low-tox glue made from natural ingredients like starch.

Sarah Fox:

One of the key things we learned from Andy is how quickly wallpaper can come down and surprisingly, how quickly it can go up. It is much faster to change the feel and colour of a space. There is no need to have three coats, drop cloths, and masking or to wait for the paint to cure.

For example, to repaint a boutique hotel you would have to close an entire floor because of the smell, and you couldn’t have other trades on site while painting because of the dust and tracking. Whereas, if you are installing heavy vinyl qualities you can have different trades on site at the same time, going room by room. Which, if you’re a hotel operator, means all the other rooms on that floor can be available.

Additionally, the non-woven backings are imbued with a fire-retardant chemical, meeting Australasian standards. Some also offer incredible acoustic qualities, such as our quilted polyester velvet wallcoverings.

Clement Riviera:

These are fantastic for a commercial space, a theatre, a living room with timber floors, or a bar. Our acoustic qualities can also help to slow the spread of the fire and there is no smell – an added protection for a hotel or even residential space. It's a very decorative way to protect your wall.

Clement Riviera:

Thanks to the developments and digital printing, you can achieve almost anything. Sometimes people don't like to see the design repeating in the wallpaper, such as tree patterns two or three meters high, so we are going to see more murals.

Natural fibres like 100% linen are growing in popularity, as are faux silks with laminations where you can see the shine coming through the paper.