Wallpaper Installation in Philadelphia, PA

Our Approach to Wallpaper Services

A crooked seam or a pattern that drifts off level is visible from across the room, and there's no touching it up after the fact. Wallpaper is unforgiving work, which is why it's worth hiring someone who hangs it constantly instead of a painter who does it twice a year.

We install vinyl, grasscloth, linen, fabric-backed, peel-and-stick, and textured wallcoverings, from single accent walls to full rooms. Layout gets planned before anything touches the wall, so the pattern centers where your eye lands and the seams fall where they hide, usually a low corner or behind a door instead of dead center over the sofa. On a repeating print we check the match across the whole run first, because a pattern that creeps a sixteenth of an inch per strip is a wall that looks wrong and nobody can quite say why.

Old rowhome walls are the real work here. A century of plaster is rarely flat, and the lumps and waves that hide under a coat of matte paint telegraph straight through wallpaper and shadow along every seam. So we skim the high and low spots, patch what needs patching, then size and prime the wall with a wallpaper primer. Sizing gives the paste something consistent to grab, and it lets the paper come off cleanly years from now instead of taking the plaster face with it. Skip that step on bare or freshly patched drywall and the next person to remove it is looking at a demolition job.

Different papers behave differently, and we hang each on its own terms. Grasscloth and other natural materials have no repeating pattern to match, so the seams are meant to be seen, which makes panel sequencing and shading between rolls matter more than anything. Peel-and-stick is forgiving to install but wants a clean, fully cured, smooth wall or it lifts at the edges within a season, and it doesn't love the humidity swings in a Philadelphia bathroom. We'll tell you at the estimate which product suits the room and which one is going to fight you.

Murals and single accent walls are some of our favorite jobs. A panel mural ships in numbered sections that have to be hung in order and matched across the seams, so the horizon line or the branches read as one continuous image instead of a set of panels. An accent wall behind a bed or in a freshly painted dining room is the fastest way to change a room, and it pairs well with plain paint on the other three walls. If you're still weighing color and pattern, our guide on choosing colors for a Philadelphia home is a good place to start.

Removal is its own skill. Old paper comes down with scoring tools and the right solution, the wall underneath gets repaired and primed, and you're left with a surface ready for paint or fresh paper instead of a torn-up mess. Whether it's one accent wall or a whole house, it's all part of our residential painting work across the city.