Design Trend: Ceiling Wallpaper
As designers and DIYers look for a finishing flourish they’re adding patterns to the ceiling.
As designers and DIYers look for a finishing flourish they’re adding patterns to the ceiling.
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.”
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: July 13, 2021.
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The nearly 10,000-square-foot home stands right at the entrance to the Amazon billionaire’s grand, $165 million estate.
A home that’s right at the entrance to Jeff Bezos’s Beverly HIlls estate, which the billionaire purchased for $165 million in 2020, is now on the market asking $19.8 million.
Shaded by mature olive trees, the three-story modern mansion on Angelo Drive spans nearly 10,000 square feet, and includes five bedrooms, a bar and lounge, a home cinema, a pool with floating benches, and a 15-car garage.
The modern home centers around a striking wood staircase that extends through all three floors, creating an eye-shaped spiral.
Other design choices include a full-height black marble fireplace, herringbone wood flooring, grayscale marble backsplashes in the kitchen and bathroom, banks of floor-to-ceiling windows and a seating area in the middle of the pool.
There is also an outdoor kitchen and eating area poolside, and a living space with sliding doors that open directly onto the pool deck, for indoor/outdoor living.
The home was built in 2021 and designed by Gabbay Architects for the owner, who purchased the underlying property for $4.1 million in 2015, according to property records accessed through PropertyShark.
The seller, who runs a Beverly Hills-based plastic surgery practice, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Benedict Canyon house came to market Friday with Tomer Fridman of Christie’s International Real Estate. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Bezos estate is also known as the Warner Estate, named after its first owner, Hollywood mogul Jack Warner of the Warner Bros.
After Warner, the 9-acre estate was owned by music executive and film producer David Geffen, followed by Bezos. The property includes a palatial Gregorian Revival mansion built in 1939 and designed by architect Florence Yoch to befit the status of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.
At $19.8 million, the new listing offers quite a deal compared to other properties neighbouring Bezos. In Florida, the owner of a vacant lot next door to the Amazon founder’s estate on Indian Creek Island is asking $150 million for it.
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