I’m THRILLED that so many of you approve of the bird-a-palooza that’s taken place in my foyer. Thanks so much for all the words of support.
Some of you asked a very good question: “So where does the wallpaper end?”
The answer wasn’t obvious.
For some reason, there’s a long horizontal bump dividing the wall along the stairs.
I don’t know why it’s there or what it does…well, it does nothing, but you’d think there would be a reason for it, wouldn’t you?
I thought this might be a natural stopping point for the wallpaper. We might have had to run a small line of trim along the top of it to give it a nice clean edge, but it seemed like a logical stopping point.
My installer disagreed. He thought we should bring the wallpaper all the way up the stairs and stop it at the first corner.
Ultimately, I allowed it, but I did so because of the wallpaper itself: the pattern is so large and dramatic that I thought it would look goofy to cut it off in the middle. Plus I didn’t want a bunch of decapitated birds hanging out in the middle of the stairwell.
This way, when you’re standing in the foyer, your eye follows the birds all the way to the top of the stairs.
If the pattern had been smaller or more monochromatic, I might have stopped it above that bump. If our stairwell wrapped tidily up to the third floor (this is a row house, remember), I probably would have carried the wallpaper all the way up. But the second floor is an open family room.
Plus, that’s a lot of birds.
In every project there’s some compromise: I don’t love seeing the peek of wallpaper in the context of the second floor. But you really only see a sliver of it from the family room, so it’s ok.
The walls on the second floor are light yellow – as they were in the foyer. They don’t clash, but it’s not ideal. I’ve been thinking that it might be time to paint those walls anyway…maybe pick up on the soft gray of the lattice in the wallpaper…
I believe this is called, “project creep.” Isn’t that right?
Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She has been quoted in publications from The New York Times to Real Simple and is considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.