Abaca wallpaper

Abaca wallpaper is woven rather than printed, and that one fact should shape how you shop for it. The fiber is spun from the abaca plant, a relative of the banana, and it reaches the wall as a real textile: visible threads, a low sheen, a ground that shifts as daylight crosses it. If your last project used a paste-the-wall nonwoven, expect something different here.

Which rooms suit abaca wallpaper

A woven ground rewards raking light, so it works best on a wall that is grazed rather than flooded: an entryway, a stair wall, the long side of a den. Behind a headboard in a primary bedroom it reads as a warm neutral, leaving art and furniture room to sit. It takes the flatness off new drywall and softens sound a little. A powder room can work, since it usually stays dry; a bathroom that steams up, or a mudroom hung with wet coats, is the wrong place for plant fiber.

How the abaca weave reads up close

Color stays quiet: raw sand and ecru at the pale end, hemp and a smoked brown at the other. Some qualities carry a fine metal thread or colored weft that lifts the fiber under lamplight without making the wall shiny. Because the crop is farmed and then woven on narrow looms or by hand, tone and thread direction shift from length to length, and seams stay faintly readable. That is not a flaw to correct; it is how the wider grasscloth wallpaper family has always looked, with abaca at its finer end.

Ordering and hanging abaca wallpaper

Order a whole room from one dye lot and keep the lengths in sequence as they come off the roll. Roll width and length vary by weave and by house, so read them off the product page you are ordering from; we give the US measurement with the metric size in parentheses, which is the figure an installer wants in hand before anything is cut. The wall underneath has to be smooth and evenly colored: a fine weave telegraphs a patched seam or a dark repair. Keep paste off the fiber altogether, put it on the wall, and butt the lengths instead of overlapping them.

The houses behind our abaca wallpaper

CMO Paris works the fiber into close, finely woven grounds, part of that range run through with metal thread. Mark Alexander, Casamance and Phillip Jeffries each read the same fiber their own way, which is why it pays to lay their samples next to one another. If it turns out finer than you pictured, jute wallpaper is coarser, sisal wallpaper has a drier, more open grid, and paperweave wallpaper swaps plant thread for rolled paper strips. Working to a color rather than a material? Our beige wallpaper brings abaca and its rougher cousins together under one tone.

Shipping your abaca order to the United States

Every roll ships from the Netherlands, and duties and taxes are included in the price shown, so nothing arrives as a surprise. Order a sample first: photographs flatten a woven ground, and holding the fiber against your own trim and floor settles it faster than any screen.