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Blue Leopard Interiors | Fall ‘24 One Room Challenge| Romantic Primary Suite| Week Four | Installing a Wallpaper Mural

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Welcome to Week Four of the Fall 2024 One Room Challenge! We’re half way to the finish already – and just to catch you up on what’s happening in case you’re new here, I’m an interior designer based in Great Falls, Virginia, and since 2022, while concurrently transforming my clients’ homes, I’ve also been transforming one room at a time in my own home, and documenting the process on my blog and social media for the One Room Challenge. The ORC is a bi-annual event, where every spring and fall, designers, home bloggers and DIY’ers make over a room in 8 weeks. It’s not a competition, as there is no winner, but it is a super-fun, supportive online challenge that really works to inspire a person to get a space completed in a short amount of time! And for those who just want to follow along, it’s also super fun and informative to keep up with the weekly progress, and see all of the “Reveals” on Week Eight!! I highly recommend you check out all of the other participants here!

For this One Room Challenge, I’m transforming our previously bland and uninspiring Primary Bedroom and Sitting Room into a “Romantic Retreat”, full of colors, textures, patterns, and lots of good vibes!  In Week One I showed you the Before Photos, along with the inspiration for the Romantic Retreat, in Week Two I documented the Renovations we’ve done to the room, in Week Three I shared how I chose to try out a new paint trend called “Double Drenching” for all the walls and trim in the two rooms, and this week is super exciting, because I’m going to show you the Wallpaper Mural we installed in the sitting room!! So go check out the past three weeks, and meet me back here in a few!

 

Choosing a Wallpaper Mural

 

Ever since I started dreaming of the design for our bedroom, I’ve known I wanted a wallpaper mural to be in the mix. I love how they add so much atmosphere to a room, and I feel like they can really transport the inhabitants to a different place and time. I was initially planning to install the mural in the bedroom, along the wall where our bed sits (more on that later!), and as I do for all of my clients, I like to mock-up a few options to really visualize what works best.  Just for fun, I thought I’d show you some of the murals I considered before landing on my favorite:

 

Option One

A mock-up of the Angkor Jungle Morn Bespoke Mural from Graham & Brown – very pretty and “bright”, but not quite the mood I was going for

 

Option Two

The Sketch Forest Morning mural, also from Graham & Brown is definitely more moody – but perhaps a little too moody??

 

Option Three

By far my favorite of all the options, the Paradise Mural from Anthropologie! It has all of the pretty pinks and greens I wanted to incorporate, and has a whimsical feel with the oversized flowers and greenery. Not too bright, not too dark – just RIGHT – for this Goldilocks!

 

I had been eyeing the Paradise mural from Anthro for a long time, but as soon as I added it to a mood board, I knew it was the right choice! The bonus is that it includes colors that work well with many of the furniture and accessories in the room I planned to keep, AND it was on sale when I bought it! Even at full price, it’s a bargain compared to many other murals.

 

Choosing the Placement of the Wallpaper Mural

 

Unlike wallpapering an entire room with wallpaper, which I typically prefer to use on all walls of a room, murals can work well on just one wall. I also knew the Paradise Mural would add a lot of deep color to the room, thereby darkening it a bit, so I didn’t want to use it on more than one wall. That said, this bedroom and sitting room has a somewhat odd layout, with a lot of angled walls which don’t necessarily lend themselves to one logical spot to install a mural. Like I mentioned above, I originally planned to install it on the wall behind the bed, but once I saw how much of it would be covered up by our tall king-size headboard, I wasn’t sure. Here’s a look at the floor plan I created on my design software for the entire Primary Suite, which includes the bedroom, sitting room, and en-suite bathroom:

 

As you can see above, there aren’t many long walls for a mural in these two rooms.

 

 

Option One

An initial Mock-up of the wallpaper mural on the wall behind the bed, as well as on the angled wall to the left of the bed.

 

When I stood in the room imagining this gorgeous wallpaper mural behind the bed as well as on the angled wall, I thought about the Pros and the Cons –

Pros:

1. We would be able to use the entire mural

And then I couldn’t think of any more Pros after I thought about the Cons –

Cons:

  1. The actual bed will cover up a lot of the mural
  2. If I’m in bed, the mural will be behind me and I won’t be able to see it, other than a little of it on the angled wall
  3.  If I used the mural on two walls, it might look like I tried to do the whole room, but ran out of wallpaper – definitely not what I wanted. And if I did do all the walls, that would mean ordering a total of three murals, (Read: Lots of $$$), there would be a lot of wastage because of the doors, windows and fireplace on the other walls, and it might make the bedroom quite dark.

Once I concluded that the mural had to be on just one wall, I went back to the drawing board. I measured out the wall that the fireplace is on, which our bed faces. If I installed it there, I would be able to see it, and it might look like a feature, instead of “we ran out of wallpaper”! So I made another mood board:

Option Two

Mock-up of the mural on the Fireplace wall

 

I really considered this option for a bit, but ultimately decided:

  1. The wall was too short, and I would be wasting too much of the best parts of the mural by using it here.
  2. At some point we had also decided we weren’t going to put the TV back in the room, and instead wanted to hang a piece of art we’ve owned for years there. The art works well in the room – but NOT layered on top of the Wallpaper – see below:

 

Option 2.5

Wallpaper Mural with Art Layered on Top – I had this piece of art framed years ago. It’s a print of “Tuesday’s Child” by Michael Parkes. I love the art, and I love the mural, but I do not love them together.

 

Then I had another idea – how about hanging the mural in the Sitting Room on the wall that is shared with our closets??

 

The circled wall above, that has the doors leading into the bathroom, seemed to make the most sense for the wallpaper mural!

 

Here’s the Mood Board of the wallpaper mural on that wall –

Option Three

The best option of all – wallpaper mural on the sitting room wall FTW!

Finally an option that made the most sense – all Pros, no Cons:

  1. Since the bedroom is so open to the sitting room, we can see this wall easily from the bed, AND when walking into the room
  2. This wall is longer, so I would be able to use a good portion of the wall with less wastage
  3. Very little furniture would be blocking the mural
  4. Installing the mural here would make a big statement AND look intentional

Once that decision was made, I booked my fabulous wallpaper installer (see her work in my Dining Room, Butler’s Pantry, and Parlor) to get her on the calendar. She is always booked far in advance, but this decision was made far enough out that she could fit me in this past week!

 

Wallpaper Mural Installation

Because I had already decided where the mural would be installed by the time the room was painted, my painters were able to prep the wall for wallpaper by giving it a light sanding to remove any imperfections, and then two coats of the Sherwin Williams Sea Salt paint we used on the other walls in the sitting room. They could have left the wall in the beige color that was on the walls originally, but Sea Salt is lighter, and would therefore prevent any dark color from bleeding through the lighter areas of the mural. So with the wall already prepped, I made sure there wasn’t any furniture in the way the day Cathy was scheduled to start.

Our first decision on installation day, was which part of the mural to use on the wall, since as I mentioned above, we knew the wall wasn’t quite long enough.  The Paradise Mural from Anthro is very large – 120″ high x 243″ wide – and is divided into 9 panels, each measuring 27″ wide. What ended up being a great tool to help us visualize the portion to use on the wall, was a small diagram of the mural that was printed at the top of the first panel. I had cut it out when I first ordered the mural so that I could carry it around along with my paint chips and fabric samples while sourcing art and accessories.

 

The scaled down diagram of the mural that proved to be quite useful!

We  thought about starting with the first panel, and ending with the first half of the seventh, or starting with the second panel and ending with the first half of the eighth, but we would have lost a lot of the prettiest flowers in both scenarios either on the ends, or where the cutouts for the bathroom doors would be placed. We realized it was much easier to visualize which panels to use by folding back the diagram than by pulling out all the panels and looking at them on the floor:

 

Folding the diagram helped us choose which panels to use on the wall

We finally decided that starting with the second half of Panel Two and ending with the the full Panel Eight was our best option. Cathy would still need to trim The top and bottom quite a bit to fit the height of my walls minus the baseboard and crown moulding, but luckily the mural was designed in such a way that all the prettiest stuff is closer to the middle, and not much on the top or bottom will be missed when trimmed.Once that was done, she was ready to start hanging!

 

Cathy started by hanging Panel 3, working her way down the wall, then went back to hang the second half of Panel 2.

Cathy has been installing wallpaper for 30 years, so as you can imagine, she is very adept, and very fast! By the time I came back about 20 minutes after that photo was taken, she had already started on the area above the door!

 

Within less than an hour, Cathy had hung the first half of the mural!

 

And that’s all I’m going to show you on the blog, for now! If you want a sneak peek at the whole wall finished, check out my Week Four Instagram post, and make sure to let me know what you think in the comments there! I’ll do a full reveal on Week Eight of course, but just know that it is absolutely stunning and worth coming back to see how it relates to the entire room. I’m thrilled with how it pulls everything together and creates such a moody yet colorful vibe – a Romantic Retreat indeed!

Next week I’ll be sharing all the details of my process for choosing the lighting for the Romantic Retreat, as well as the semi-custom curtains in the bedroom, and fully custom Roman shades in the sitting room! In the meantime, make sure to check out the progress of all the other ORC participants at their half way point this week, right here.

 

Cheers!

Justine

Here is my ORC progress

Week 1  ||  Week 2  ||  Week 3  ||  Week 4  ||  Week 5  ||  Week 6 ||  Week 7  ||  Week 8