Revealing our new hallway wallpaper!!

From the day we closed on this house back in August, I knew that deciding this entryway wallpaper would set the design tone for the entire house. This landing is the first space guests see, it connects the front two rooms of the home to one another, and it’s our biggest passageway. I knew I had to get it right.

No pressure.

At first I fell in love with a large mural wallpaper, but then when I considered the existing wainscoting that rises halfway up the wall, I knew so much of a mural would be wasted. Plus, in the entryway landing, every single wall has either a door or a cased opening. So then I started considered smaller patterns.

About that time, I landed on a design from Spoonflower. If you’re not familiar, Spoonflower is a company that offers print-on-demand wallpaper, fabric and decor designed by independent artists. They’ve been around for 14 years and are based in Durham, where I recently lived for 5 years. They gifted me their peel and stick wallpaper to cover a side table (watch me do it here), and was impressed with the paper quality. And so I thought it’d be worth seeing/feeling a sample of their traditional wallpaper to see if it also held up to the quality test. After getting a few samples in, I was smitten, so they offered to gift me six rolls to complete the project.

But let me tell you my favorite part of their offerings: the customization. If there’s a design you love but prefer a different colorway, you can contact the artist via the website and they’ll work with you on a custom palette. Anyone can do this — not just design pros or bloggers. How amazing is that?!

In my case, I worked directly with one of their artists, Danika Herrick, to create a palette that combined the Oval Room blue paint from our dining room, the olive green of our dining chairs, and then the Cougar Brown-dark pink-mauve trim that extends from our living room into the entryway. The image below was a quick mood board I shared with her along with links to paint colors, and here’s where we landed. As for the thistle stars pattern itself, I love that it’s whimsical but still sophisticated and it feels a bit Scandinavian. And the paper feels so nice and thick, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Now I just wish I could just close my eyes and some wallpaper fairies would hang it for me…(maybe I’ll start next week?).