I love seeing the offices of design mavens because they inevitably have some fabulous desktop wallpaper on the screen for the photo op, always something that complements the rest of the design of the office.
Case in point:
Making it Lovely's Nicole shared her office recently, and my eye gravitated immediately to her Mac and the art on her desktop, the colors of which coordinate with the dominant pinks and reds of her office space.
I too enjoy a pretty, serene wallpaper as the setting for the madness that takes place on top of it; right now I can't seem to shake the
Kaiku Marimekko pattern. Other times, I want to see a family pic stretched across my monitor, and sometimes I crave a simple, solid color to calm me.
Christiana Coop of
Ferm Living recently shared a DIY project of hers on her blog
Clever Spaces, finding yet another use for Ferm's gorgeous wallpaper. She decided to update a
Target Secretary Desk ($144.99) by priming and painting it white, and wallpapering the interior with the
Ferm Wild Flower (Green) Wallpaper ($115). By measuring the inside sections of the desk first, and then using an adhesive spray to keep them down, the project was pretty breezy.
I recently introduced you to
Graham & Brown's Paste the Wall wallpaper, which applies easily by pasting the wall not the paper, and peels off in full sheets. I was certainly won over by the retailer's new wallpaper technology, not to mention their vast selection of beautiful patterns and didn't think it could get any better. But it turns out that the
Overlapping Leaves Wallpaper ($59.99, reduced from $84) not only pulls out in full sheets, but also has a preapplied adhesive that affixes effortlessly .
Have you ever considered painting your walls a feminine pink. If you've hesitated for fear that it might be too loud, too girly, or too . .
If you think back to nearly a year ago, you might remember the cool company that sponsored my Dress Your Walls contest. It's the same company that designed this polka-dot wallpaper.
Because I'm on a
Freaks and Geeks viewing kick, I dug these up for the loyal fans — and if you know F&G, you're a diehard — who are more geeky than freaky. There's 30 fabulous free
Freaks and Geeks desktop wallpapers to choose from; I plan on rotating them according to my moods, like say, when I get picked last for dodgeball.
Oh, seeing their shiny faces makes me feel like they never went off the air and are instead living some awesome fictional life, where
Lindsay Weir went with her math instincts and represented with an adult-geek-girl job, and Bill Haverchuck became my BFF.
Once you've
hung wallpaper like a pro, there may come a time when you think it's time to say sayonara to the paper you'd chosen. If your wallpaper pulls off in full sheets, like
Graham & Brown Paste the Wall, it'll make the removal process a lot easier. But, either way, you'll still have to deal with washing off the wheat paste you used to hang it.
Even if you know
how to hang wallpaper like a pro, it's still a bit of an intimidating task. And removing it — be it by the soak-and-scrape method or with a steamer — is always a big ole, time-intensive pain in the butt. Or, it was, until the
Graham & Brown Paste the Wall wallpaper came around.I came across this novel wallpaper technology, which claimed to make "wallpapering simple, clean, and quick for even the novice decorator," because it peels off in full sheets, requiring no steaming or scraping, and because you paste the wall itself rather than the paper when hanging.
In Amsterdam, a Dutch couple based its décor on a range of noncolors, using blacks and whites, asphalt, variations of gray, earth tones, and light — skillfully (and daringly) playing with blends and mismatches. In the playroom, they used the dark colors but made a bold move by wallpapering with their children's drawings. Rather than letting their children
run loose with fabric markers on a muslin sofa, they made large-format, black-and-white photocopies of their children's artwork and adhered them to the wall in a repeat, much like traditional wallpaper.
I'm an unabashed Marimekko freak — I flipped over these
mouse pads, because I love integrating my favorite designs into my digital life, and I see that they enjoy doing it too, because they've made
desktop wallpapers in some of Marimekko's classic prints.
I'm typing to you directly from the
Kaiku wallpaper, a personal fave, and I have my eye on a few other Finnish beauts that'll make their way to my background in due time as well.
Oh, technology: democratizing design, one desktop at a time.
