I'm so excited to introduce Lauren Liess from Pure Style Home as my guest blogger today! Not only is Lauren an amazingly talented interior designer, she is also a wonderful wife (to Dave) and mother to her gorgeous boys, Christian and Justin.
Check out her blog to see the jaw dropping changes she has made to her own home. She really is incredible, and Dave would get my "Fantastic Husband Award" just for doing the stencil work on this wall (isn't it beautiful!)
I'm so honored that she would take time out of her crazy, hectic schedule to be a part of my blog series "What We've Learned". Thank you Lauren!!!!!
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Hello Velvet & Linen readers!! I'm thrilled to be here today as I truly admire Brooke and all that she does... V&L is always beautiful, happy and interesting (and of course often drop-dead-gorgeous-jaw-dropping) and I'm so glad to join in!
When thinking of "what I've learned," I thought back through all of the things we've done that didn't go as planned -and there have been a lot of them. But one of the things that didn't turn out as planned that's made me the happiest was the massive print we had made for our dining room wall. Here's a photo of our dining room before:
In our dining room we wanted something special on the wall where the wooden shelf is in the photo above. Since the dining room is so small, we needed to go with art instead of a piece of furniture because we'd purchased a new larger pedestal table to accomodate more people:
{Pottery Barn Table}
Because the dining room is open to the living room we needed something that would create a beautiful view from the living room and also something larege enough to balance out the off-centered window on the wall. My husband (Dave) and I both fell in love with this 15th Century Albretch Durer print:
...But it was only 8 x 10 inches or so... I'd fallen in love with Nina Griscom's
Gnarled Trees (below, featured in Elle Decor) blown up on Canvas and wanted to blow up the Durer drawing on a 7 feet by 5 feet canvas.
Our initial fear was the loss of quality the drawing would suffer being blown up to seven by five feet... We were able to get a sample printed at a Kinko's to show us how the pixels would look:
It was pretty "pixelly" and we were hesitant, but I liked the look and since our house is a mix of modern & traditional, I was willing to take the risk and thought it would work. So, we decided to go ahead with the project and we went here:
http://www.wizardprints.com/step-1.php to load our digital image and have it enlarged. The order went through and I waited on pins & needles. (At 7' x 5' it was no small expense and if it went badly we were out of luck.) A couple of days later, I got a call from Wizard Prints (the company) saying they couldn't do a canvas that large even if we were to have our local framer stretch it. I was so disappointed but there were other options we could try. Nothing they had was large enough to handle the large size we needed... So, we ended up going with a fabric with an adhesive backing that would come in two pieces that we would literally have to stick to the wall. When it arrived in a roll, we hung it almost like wallpaper and tried to make it look as seamless as possible:
{Can you see the seam?? Sticking it to the wall evenly was not an easy process but the seam is barely visible.}
And we love it! I'm so glad the initial canvas didn't work out because I don't have to worry about anyone knocking into the canvas (the space is really that small). You can run your hands over the fabric and it's safe! It reminds me of a modern tapestry and it also cost less than canvas would have.
It gave us the impact we needed and has the conversation-sparking quality we wanted. Our two-year-old loves to point out the horse and the little dog (bottom left, can't be seen in these photos) and even makes shapes/ animals out of the background almost like looking for shapes in the clouds.
So we learned a lot about this new product and I will definitely be using it for future client projects. It's such a great way to add personalized drama to a space. To load images and have them transfered to canvas, paper, adhesive backed paper, etc. Go here.
Hope you enjoyed and Brooke, thanks so much for having me!!
xoxo,
lauren
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Thank you Lauren, for sharing this story with me and my readers! I've always loved your dining room. It's been so interesting getting some insight into your design process and how you dealt with the issues that came up while you created your mural. You're right, sometimes things work out better than you even imagined!
xo xo
Brooke
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