From botanicals to geometrics, today’s top designers discuss their artful use of wallpaper and its transformative nature.
Jan Showers
Dallas-based designer Jan Showers is renowned for her glamorous style, both personally and professionally. Luxurious fabrics, chic furniture and mirrored accents characterize her work, which also often includes elegantly papered walls. “I’m drawn to wallpaper because I love variation within a house, and nothing creates that variation better,” she states.
Broad-minded when it comes to choosing wallpaper (“We use all kinds, including patterns, textures and solid colors,” she says), Showers nevertheless has a particular soft spot for wallcoverings with nature-inspired motifs, especially birds or trees. Both are present inside the Palm Beach residence shown above. By lavishing its entry and powder room with a mural wallpaper depicting palm trees and tropical birds, she crafted a scene that is befitting of its South Florida setting. In other Showers-designed entries, however, there is a good chance that visitors will encounter shimmering metallic wallpaper, which she admits to using frequently, despite otherwise avoiding repetition. “I gravitate toward Silver Tea Leaf by Gracie. Wherever you put it, the paper looks fantastic.”
Differences aside, there is a unifying theme among the wallpapers she uses: timelessness, a quality Showers strives for throughout her designs. “I want a project to look like I just did it, even 20 years after it has been completed,” she says.
Clara Jung
A standout in the world of design, Clara Jung is making a name for herself with her creativity, which she often expresses through wallpaper. “I view it as another form of art, just on a larger canvas,” Jung says, but she emphasizes, “I don’t use it traditionally.”
Favoring wallcoverings animated by lively colors and patterns, like the pixelated design seen below, the Berkeley, California-based Jung employs them adventurously. While many designers make it standard practice to forgo pattern on living room walls, Jung is inclined to paper them in bold, splashy prints, particularly when her clients lack artwork. “If you’re yet to have an art collection, wallpaper is a good first step,” she advises. She also once embellished a pool house bathroom with wallpaper portraying hookah-smoking animals, an indication of the whimsy and lightheartedness that often invigorates her work. But even when Jung has fun with wallcoverings, she stresses that there is nothing capricious about her design decisions, which are always done “thoughtfully and with intention,” she explains. For example, “I never wallpaper rooms with open floor plans,” the designer shares.
Jung sees no sign of the desire for wallpaper waning, with clients increasingly requesting decorated walls of their own. “Wallpaper has been in vogue for the last 10 years,” she remarks. “I don’t believe the enthusiasm for it will subside anytime soon.”
Meg Braff
Designer Meg Braff is such an ardent wallpaper devotee that she purchased and revived the archival designs of esteemed wallpaper manufacturer Philip Graf, among others. So, understandably, Braff employs the medium in almost every home she decorates. “Wallpaper is transformative,” she says. “It allows you to create a unique space that has presence and character.”
Braff, who splits her time between Locust Valley, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, is known for her work’s colorful, pattern-drenched traditionalism, but her palette varies depending on a home’s location and quality of light. “In sunny Florida, we tend to use wallpapers with a white background and clear, saturated colors,” she notes. In the Northeast, however, she tempers her color choices ever so slightly, as evidenced by the gold-and-sapphire-hued wallcovering she used for the Pennsylvania bedroom seen above.
As far as wallpaper styles go, Braff admires mural designs that “create drama and interest on a large scale,” she says, as well as trellis patterns that have the look of latticework. She also appreciates the reflective quality of mylar and tea paper, especially when applied to ceilings. Regardless of the type she uses, she says the reaction wallcoverings elicit is universal. “The rooms we have wallpapered are always the ones where people walk in and say, ‘Wow!’ ”
