Non-woven wallpaper in Devon

The offer of a job hanging a non-woven wallpaper in nearby Lamerton, Devon was easy to accept as the room was so large and the walls so straight forward.

The advantage of a big room is you can use a big wallpaper pattern. This pattern is called “The Brook” by Morris & Co, is sold by the metre, and comes as a 1.3 metre wide roll .

The old paper was a rather tired looking pattern that wasn’t strong enough for such a large space. After it was stripped off, everything was prepared and lined with heavyweight lining paper. The ceilings were painted with a Farrow and ball off-white, and the woodwork painted with Farrow & Ball modern eggshell.

The new paper is a non-woven, which means it is paste-the-wall and doesn’t expand or contract during or after hanging. First, the selvedge is trimmed off on the table. This leaves around a 10mm overlap in the pattern of two adjoining drops when put up on the wall. I trimmed the overlap on the wall using a straight edge.

The main difficulty hanging a paper like this is that the width makes each piece a bit unwieldy, you can end up with a large piece of paper flapping around your legs. I found it helpful to roll the drop around the cardboard tube it was delivered in, making it easier align it into position.

Some paperhangers accuse non-woven papers of being a “DIY” product; not requiring so much skill because there’s no need to handle wet paper. This is true to an extent. But on the other hand you do need to be reasonably quick  and accurate when aligning and placing a non-woven because the pasted wall does dry quite quickly. I found this to my cost some years ago, trying to hang a wide non-woven off a tower on a narrow staircase. So, for paperhangers like me who haven’t had enough experience to be called “expert”, I quite like non-wovens!

Published by: Colin Taylor on: December 6th 2018