Wallpaper Worth Building a Room Around
It all begins with an idea.
Then I find one extraordinary thing—and suddenly, the room starts telling me what it wants to become. For our powder room, that thing was wallpaper. I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want this little room to feel like an afterthought. Powder rooms are one of the few places in a home where you can be completely unapologetic. You’re not spending hours there. You don’t have to worry about whether you’ll tire of seeing it from the sofa every day. It can simply be a tiny, unexpected world of its own.
One material can change everything
I was drawn to an immersive tropical mural filled with palms, birds and layers of deep, moody green. It immediately transported me somewhere else—which is exactly the feeling I wanted. And once I found that direction, the rest of the room began to fall into place. Instead of choosing a wallpaper to coordinate with a room I had already designed, I did the opposite. I let the wallpaper lead.
The darker background called for a nearly black stone floor. The organic imagery made me want to introduce actual stone and greenery. Warm metallic details added a little glow against all that depth, while sculptural flower-inspired lighting brought another layer of nature into the room. Even the sink became part of the story: something more architectural and substantial rather than a conventional vanity.
Designing a feeling, not a theme
There’s a fine line between being transported by a room and creating a “themed” room. I’m always chasing the first. I don’t necessarily want someone to walk in and think tropical bathroom. I want them to feel something first—curiosity, surprise, maybe the sense that they’ve stumbled into a tiny hidden place somewhere far from home.
That distinction influences every choice. Rather than repeating palm leaves everywhere, I can pull from the feeling of the wallpaper: its darkness, texture, movement, warmth and sense of discovery. That gives me much more freedom with everything that comes next.
The lesson I’m taking with me
Building this house has already taught me that a room doesn’t always need to begin with a perfectly completed mood board. Sometimes you find the chandelier. Sometimes it’s a piece of stone. Sometimes it’s a chair you can’t stop thinking about.
And sometimes it’s wallpaper.
When something genuinely captures your imagination, I think there’s value in giving it permission to lead. The goal isn’t to make everything match it. The goal is to understand what made you fall in love with it in the first place—and then carry that feeling through the rest of the space.
That’s when selecting individual things starts becoming something much more interesting:
you’re creating a world of beauty.
