Designers Guild wallpaper

Designers Guild wallpaper covers more than a hundred designs, and the quickest route through it is color, not pattern. Tricia Guild has been founder and creative director of the house for over fifty years, and alongside the walls her studio draws upholstery, fabrics and collections for bed and bath. A print here is therefore designed to sit next to other things, which is why two papers from separate collections usually agree rather than argue.

Working through Designers Guild wallpaper by color family

Pick the color before the drawing. If one shade already runs through the room, open our wider green wallpaper and pink wallpaper ranges and see which of the brand's designs surface there; it is a faster filter than scrolling a hundred thumbnails. Once the color holds, the pattern decision gets much smaller.

Painted surfaces against woven ones

Two kinds of surface run through the range. Some designs read as paint left on the wall. Gertrude Rose is the clearest case, a floral with the warm, watercolor-like softness of a brush that was still wet. Others imitate cloth instead: Tapestry Flower has an almost woven appearance, and Shibori takes its flowing, organic marks from the dyeing technique it is named for. Printing keeps these designs deep and saturated in color either way, which is what stops a dark ground from going flat. Our general floral wallpaper and geometric wallpaper pages show how differently other houses handle the same subjects.

Matching pattern scale to the wall you actually have

Every design in the collection lists its pattern repeat on the product page, and that is the figure to check before anything else. A long repeat on a low wall throws away more material than most people budget for, and that waste is decided before the first strip goes up. Most European rolls run about 33 ft (10.05 m) long and 20.9 in (53 cm) wide, so count from the figures on the product page rather than converting from American single and double rolls.

Room light, and where a large pattern belongs

A north-facing wall pulls color cooler than any screen suggests, so order a sample of the design you are considering and leave it taped up for two days through both daylight and lamplight. Scale answers to the room in the same way. A full-size botanical rarely holds an open great room, where you only ever catch part of it, but it works in a powder room because all four walls are read at once. An entryway behaves the same. Behind a bed in a primary bedroom, a textured wallpaper earns its place more than a floral does, since that surface gets felt rather than studied. A breakfast nook takes a mid-scale repeat without crowding the table.

Hanging non-woven over drywall

Much of the range comes as non-woven wallpaper, a backing that is hung by pasting the wall rather than the paper. That keeps the strips dimensionally stable while you work and makes a clean removal later easier on drywall. If the design has a large repeat, book a hanger rather than learning on your own hallway.

Ordering Designers Guild wallpaper from a European specialist

Designers Guild was founded in London in 1970, and Guild's first shop stood on the King's Road; showrooms and offices now sit in Munich, Paris and London, and those three are not the only cities on the list. We supply the original collections, so the roll that reaches you is the same paper those showrooms carry. Duties and taxes are included in the price shown and orders ship from the Netherlands. Ask us about colorway or scale before you order rather than after. If you are weighing British archive prints against each other, our Cole and Son wallpaper collection is the useful comparison.