From the WSJ Real Estate Archives

Wallpaper Gets Creative
To Lure Back Homeowners

by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
From The Wall Street Journal Online
September 23, 2005

Coming soon to a store near you: wallpaper that turns your wall into a giant Hawaiian beachscape or a mural featuring floor-to-ceiling roses.

After years of declining U.S. sales, some companies are gearing up to try to persuade American homeowners that wallpaper is cool. Next month, U.K.-based Graham & Brown Inc. plans to start selling digitally printed wallpaper featuring photographic images of large-scale water droplets, leaves or flowers ($140 per mural, at Grahambrown.com).

[wallpaper photo]
Graham & Brown's digitally printed $140 wallpaper mural.
Wallpaper companies have experimented with splashy looks to push their wares in recent years, rolling out everything from feathered to loofah-like surfaces. Even so, wholesale shipments of wallpaper in the U.S. fell more than 40% to $475 million in 2004 from 1998, according to Catalina Research Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla. Still, a recent trend toward textured paint has led wallpaper companies to believe homeowners are ready to try patterns on their walls now.

Some options:

Alpha Workshops offers hand-painted wallpaper in customized colors. Buyers pick from 20 patterns, which include florals, butterflies and wood-grain designs, and choose the colors they want ($48 to $85 a yard, plus a $300 setup fee; call 212-594-7320 to order).

London-based Interactive Wallpaper is selling "New Shoes," a pattern featuring stilettos, along with packets of stickers in the shape of flowers, leaves or lace doilies for homeowners to personalize their wallpaper ($114 per roll, $18 to $38 for sticker packets, at Interactivewallpaper.co.uk).

MIO Culture has "Flow 3-D" and "V2 3D" wallpaper styles, both of which come in foot-square tiles with slightly raised, geometric patterns in colors such as lime, orange, brown or white ($12 for a pack of four; at Designpublic.com).

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