Loving Graphic Wall Treatments

So, you may have noticed that stencils are kind of a trend.  Probably because wallpaper is "back in a big way" but not super affordable.  (I'm not quoting anyone directly there, by the way, it just feels like I've heard or read that phrase a gazillion times in the past year.)

I have two big walls that offer up molto opportunities for some creative stenciling--the laundry room upstairs and the back wall of the office--and I'm just now discovering a trend in the designs I'm drawn to.  Okay, sort of two trends.

It kind of all started with this image, seen in a sneak peek on design sponge and ohdeedoh (which came first?  Who can say).

[here and here]

I love the effect of the overall triangle pattern, which the homeowner drew and painted by hand.  And I found myself having the urge to do something similar with a hexagon shape, like the bigger, more colorful cousin of the backsplash we added to our kitchen.  Kind of like a painted version of this.

[here]

I love the more limited color palette in this one, and the way it is so hand made yet almost feels digital in the color gradients.  I also like that the pattern does not go all the way to the edges.  Cool, right?

This next one uses simple squares, but ramps up the interest by using gradient colors.

[here]

So pretty.  This is from Dwell Studio, and I am remembering a similar wall treatment in a loft that, I believe, belongs to Christiane Lemieux, though I could be wrong.  I can picture the living space perfectly--maybe it was in Elle Decor?  Anyone?  (But I digress.)  Also, I wish I could be okay with this bed being nowhere near centered on the wall treatment, but I'm not.  Call me rigid.  I won't argue.

Anyway.  Then I saw this one on Apartment Therapy last week, in a house tour.

[here]

Which feels really hand made, and also does the work of a wallpaper while celebrating its stencil-ness by stopping short of the edges of the wall.  Here's a detail.

[here]

And then today on Apartment Therapy I saw this fabric stencil project, which similarly shows its hand.  I would love this on a wall.

[here]

And just to throw something vintage in there, because you know I love to look on back to the good old days, I found this.

[here]

This treatment is made from wood, which is awesome, but I can also see painting a tone on tone pattern to create a similar optical illusion.  I love the geometry of this, but the overall effect is kind of quiet.  Which might be a good thing.

Or, how about doing the opposite, and going kind of loud?

[here]

Did you ever play that drawing game where you create a shape, draw a point in the corner of the paper, then draw lines from every corner of your shape to the point, to create a 3-d object?  No?  It's fun.  This painting kind of reminds me of that.

So it appears that I need to tackle the office and/or the laundry room with a large-scale, overall graphic pattern that feels hand-made, whether hand painted, stenciled, or block-printed, and that it should perhaps use gradient or tone on tone color.  Sound good?

So that narrows it down.  Guess I'll get designing!

Oh, but there was that other trend emerging in my inspiration files.  Come on back tomorrow and I'll round it up.

Airing My Dirty Laundry

You know how sometimes you just stop seeing a mess that is right in front of you? (Much harder when you're blogging, let me tell you! Any time I go to take a casual picture, the dust, or stains, or crumbs, or toys all come into sharp focus). And then sometimes, all of a sudden, you can see it again?

That's what just happened to me with my laundry room. It's upstairs, and most of the time I'm downstairs, except when I'm putting the girls to bed and then it's dark. Well, I just went up there to get something, and walking by the open door, I saw this.

Oh my gosh. Can you believe I just shared that on the internets? It's appalling, I know. Especially since we actually have space in there, both surface and storage. And because my laundry rooms have typically been in the unfinished basement (or, in Colorado, in the kitchen), I've never given much thought to decorating them as their own space. But the blogosphere is doing it. Yup, you can follow Nicole's very nice basement laundry room redo on Making it Lovely. Pretty soon, I think Jenny will share an after, possibly based on this inspiration photo. My laundry room is getting an inferiority complex.

Suffice it to say that there will be no major renovating--the fixtures, cabinets, etc are new and coordinate with the rest of the house. But there is this Nice. Big. Wall.

And the room is sort of tucked away and private, which to me means it can be more personal, less finished than other parts of the house. I have two thoughts on what to do here.

One would be to wallpaper with one of these awesome "frames" wallpapers and use it to tape up family photos (we're not much of a family photo kind of a family, and I think it would be nice to incorporate more snapshots somewhere.)

[via Home Workshop; paper also available from Urban Outfitters]

[via blomma finds]

Come to think of it, I could make my own stencil or free-hand paint frames on the wall for a similar effect.

The second idea comes from that magazine stash from my Mother in law. Her son, my husband, happens to be a collector of T-shirts, and, as a T-shirt kind of a guy, he wears a lot of them. But he also has a vintage collection that is no longer fit to wear, but too "good" to get rid of. I love this idea to stretch them over canvases (or stretchers) of equal sizes, and hang them in a grid covering this whole wall, like they did in My Home My Style, only to the max.

Like, maybe 5 high by 6 wide?

Kind of like a new take on those LP-covered walls that you may or may not have had in college, depending on how much younger you are than me. When I asked the hubs how he felt about this, his response was "t-shirts in a laundry room. Well, I guess that makes sense." Which was a greater vote of confidence than I sometimes get for my hare-brained schemes.

I have to price out stretchers to see if one of these projects is vastly cheaper than the other, but if it's all kind of same same, let me know which you like more, and we'll see if I can get sign off from the CFO.