Design Trend: Ceiling Wallpaper

APOLLINA BAKER had every intention of papering the walls of her children’s craft room. Then reality set in. “Paint splatter and markers often end up all over the walls,” said the attorney turned design consultant in Dripping Springs, Texas. “We decided to install wallpaper on the ceiling only.” She chose Hygge & West’s Daydream, in which blue swallows swirl through cotton-candy clouds. “The room seems so much bigger and taller with the ‘sky,’” said Mrs. Baker.

That perception-altering effect of papering the ceiling—and its sheer exuberance—has design experts and DIYers looking up. “More of our customers are making a statement through wallpapering the ceiling,” said Elizabeth Rees, founder of Chasing Paper in Milwaukee, Wis. “It provides an unexpected design moment, something we’ve been looking to create this past year.” Wrapping an entire room like a present skews maximalist, but you can add a more subtle dimension with textured neutrals like grasscloth. “People are starting to realize how much design potential has been hanging above their heads,” said Adam D’Agostine, chief marketing officer of A-Street Prints, another wallpaper company, in Randolph, Mass.

If your room otherwise features wall treatments with presence and a graphic rug, ignoring the topside is like wearing a ball gown without a tiara. “It’s a balance story,” said Karen B. Wolf, an interior designer in Short Hills, N.J. “With a patterned ceiling wallpaper, you tie the room together.”

For cohesion’s sake, paint walls and/or trim a shade you pull from the ceiling paper, suggested Dina Holland, an interior designer in Needham, Mass. A white perimeter looks unfinished, “like you started but got scared,” she said. In her children’s craft room, Mrs. Baker painted the built-in desk and cabinets in Farrow & Ball’s Stone Blue, picking up the color of the birds overhead. Mrs. Holland gave a powder room (shown) personality by combining sparse fish graphics on the walls with a dense coral print above, varying scale to give the eye a place to rest.

A couple of precautions: A pattern that relies on an up/down orientation to make sense can create discord because you come at the ceiling from multiple directions, noted Cathy Purple Cherry, a designer in Annapolis, Md. And removal can be quite challenging. But don’t let that dissuade you. Powder rooms in particular lend themselves to ceiling design, Mrs. Purple Cherry added, because visitors sit with little to do but check out the room, “and it’s kind of a peek-a-boo moment.”

Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.

This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.

“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.

“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”

Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.

He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.

“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.

“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”

Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.

Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.

“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.

“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?

“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”

At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.

“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”

And there’s no AI option for that.

Design Trend: Ceiling Wallpaper

As designers and DIYers look for a finishing flourish they’re adding patterns to the ceiling.

A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities