Blue wallpaper

Blue wallpaper reads differently in an American house than it does in a European one. Ceilings run higher, wall runs are longer, and drywall gives you a flat, even surface that carries fine detail well. Our blues go from pale sky and denim through cobalt and teal to a near-black midnight, in quiet textures, prints and full-wall scenes.

Zoning an open floor plan with blue

An open plan is hard to decorate with color: one continuous space has to do several jobs at once. Blue handles that quietly. Papering the dining end of a great room in a deep navy marks that zone as its own while the seating side stays light, and because blue recedes, nothing feels chopped up. Run a single light gray-blue across the whole floor instead and you get one calm envelope rather than two rooms.

Powder room, entryway and stairwell

Small enclosed rooms are the easiest place to begin. A powder room has no daylight to lose, so a saturated cobalt or indigo gives a windowless box some character, and a stairwell hands you a tall, uninterrupted run where a large repeat can finally be read top to bottom. In a full bath, humidity decides for you: choose a wipeable finish or something from our bathroom wallpaper selection rather than a delicate paper.

Judging blue wallpaper under the light you actually have

Blue shifts with light more than most colors do. Warm-white LED bulbs pull a cool blue toward gray, and hard afternoon sun through a south-facing window flattens a mid blue by four o'clock. Order samples before you order rolls, tape them to the wall you have in mind, and look once at breakfast and again at nine at night. If navy feels heavy for the room, aqua wallpaper and turquoise wallpaper keep the color without taking light out of it.

Texture rather than print

Not every blue wall wants a motif. A woven grasscloth wallpaper in indigo gives a wide drywall plane something to catch the light on. If you would rather sort by construction than by pattern, start in the non-woven wallpaper selection. And where one wall has to carry the whole room, a blue panorama wallpaper of water, sky or a distant shoreline changes it further than any repeat can.

European roll sizes, US delivery and duties

Working out how much blue wallpaper you need takes a moment of arithmetic. A standard European roll measures 32.8 ft (10 m) long by 20.9 in (53 cm) wide, roughly 57 sq ft (5.3 m²) of coverage. Rolls are labeled differently in the States, so compare square footage rather than roll counts and allow for the pattern repeat; each item in our wallpaper sold by the roll selection lists its own width, length and repeat. Import duties and taxes sit in the price, and shipping to the US is free above a set order value already, so nothing extra is owed at the door.