Wallpaper Hanging in Hampstead & North London

Yes, and in NW3 that is most of the work. We stabilise friable or powdery areas, fill and sand, and seal porous plaster so it cannot draw the water out of the adhesive before the paper grabs. The wall is then cross-lined with 1400-grade lining paper hung horizontally, so no lining seam sits beneath a decorative one and the finished paper meets a single, uniformly absorbent surface rather than a patchwork of old repairs. Foil-backed and silk papers are lined in 1700-grade instead, because they show every ridge underneath them.

Papers with large pattern repeats, such as a 53cm half-drop, typically generate 15 to 25 percent waste, and the taller the wall the worse it gets: a period reception room with high ceilings loses more of a big repeat than a flat with standard ones. We measure the room, calculate the drops against the repeat before you order, and confirm the roll count in writing. The hanging plan then places the surplus above doors and below the picture rail rather than in the bin.

We regularly hang high-value designer papers — de Gournay hand-painted panels, Cole & Son, Zoffany, Morris & Co and Osborne & Little. The handling is what differs. Hand-printed and silk papers are pasted to the wall rather than to the paper wherever the manufacturer allows it, kept dry-edged, and never stretched to close a gap, because a stretched drop shrinks back as it dries and reopens the very seam you were trying to close. Where paste-the-paper is specified we book each drop on a pasting table for the stated soak time, so every drop expands by the same amount before it goes on the wall.

Very few period walls are, which is why we never hang the first drop off a corner or an architrave — neither is reliably vertical. We strike a plumb line and hang to that. The room is then set out so the discrepancy an out-of-square room always contains falls at an external corner or above a door, where the eye does not read it, instead of drifting visibly across a long flat wall or through a bold repeat. On undulating walls the cross-lining does the rest, bridging the minor cracks and hollows that would otherwise print through the finished paper.

A single feature wall is usually a day, a full room one to two days once the walls are prepared, and two to three days for a large-repeat designer paper where the set-out and the matching take longer. Lining adds time of its own: cross-lining has to go up and dry before any decorative paper can be hung, so a room that needs lining is a longer job than one that does not. Wallpaper hanging is guided at £400–£800 per room, excluding the cost of the paper itself.

We work across Hampstead Village, Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage, Primrose Hill, Finchley Road, West Hampstead from our Finchley Road base. If your street is not listed, call us — we cover most of NW and N London and will tell you honestly if a job is outside our patch.

Period houses and flats where the plaster is old and slightly uneven and wants cross-lining first, and contemporary interiors where one feature wall or a stairwell carries the whole scheme. Chimney breasts, deep cornices and tall stairwells are the ones worth surveying before you order, because they set the wastage.