Try it before you buy it: order your swatches today
Experience our fabrics, trims and wallpapers in the comfort of your home.
The Art of the Well-Dressed Wall
Wallpaper is the single most transformative design decision in a room. A carefully chosen pattern or texture brings architecture, personality, and a sense of intention that paint alone cannot achieve. It tells a story about the people who live there, the places that inspire them, and the atmosphere they want to inhabit every day.
At Calico, our wallpaper collection is curated with the same meticulous eye we bring to our 5,000+ home decorating fabrics. We work directly with our vendors to bring you patterns and textures that are genuinely beautiful, enduringly relevant, and masterfully produced.
Whether you are papering an entire home or creating a single dramatic accent wall, our design specialists are here to guide every step of the process.
- Grass Cloth & Natural Fiber: Woven from seagrass, jute, sisal, abacá, and bamboo, natural fiber wallcoverings bring irreplaceable organic texture to a room. Each roll is unique; the natural variation in fiber and dye is part of their beauty. Grass cloth has become a design cornerstone for living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms seeking warmth and depth.
- Printed & Pattern Wallpaper: The broadest category in our collection, printed wallpapers span florals, botanicals, geometrics, abstract patterns, classic toiles, chinoiserie, stripes, and contemporary graphic designs. Printed on quality substrates from paper to non-woven, these patterns give rooms personality, playfulness, and a defining visual identity.
- Textured & Embossed: Textured wallpapers add tactile interest and dimensional depth without introducing a bold pattern, making them an ideal choice for rooms where you want to elevate the walls without competing with furniture or art. Options include linen-look, Venetian plaster effects, subtle geometric embossing, and woven-look textures that suggest natural materials.
- Scenic & Mural Wallpaper: A scenic mural is perhaps the boldest single design statement you can make transforming an entire wall into a landscape, a forest, an ocean, a historic cityscape, or an abstract painterly composition. Printed across multiple panels that join seamlessly, murals create immersive environments that no other wall treatment can replicate.
- Vinyl & Performance Wallcovering: Engineered for demanding environments like kitchens, bathrooms, mudrooms, and commercial spaces, vinyl-coated and Type II commercial wallcoverings offer exceptional durability, moisture resistance, and cleanability. Modern production techniques have elevated vinyl wallcoverings to remarkable levels of design sophistication, with options that convincingly mimic linen, leather, and stone.
How to Select the Right Wallpaper
Practical Considerations
- Room Conditions: Moisture levels matter enormously. Bathrooms and kitchens require moisture-resistant non-woven or vinyl-coated wallpaper. Grass cloth and natural fiber wallcoverings are not suitable for high-humidity spaces but thrive in dry rooms.
- Wall Condition: Wallpaper reveals imperfections. Walls with significant texture, holes, or uneven surfaces should be skim-coated or primed before papering. Please have your installation specialists assess wall condition before beginning any project.
- Pattern Scale & Repeat: Large-scale patterns work best in large rooms with generous wall space. Small-scale patterns suit tight rooms, hallways, and powder rooms. Pattern repeat also affects how much material you need. Always factor in extra yardage for matching.
- Light & Orientation: Dark-ground wallpaper works beautifully in rooms with good natural or artificial light. North-facing rooms with limited light can feel heavy with very dark or dense patterns, unless it is intentional, consider lighter grounds or textured wallcoverings.
Design Principles
- Feature Wall vs. Full Room: A single feature wall, typically behind the bed, sofa, or fireplace creates high impact with a fraction of the cost and effort of a full room. Bold, large-scale, or expensive papers are ideal feature wall choices. Subtle textures and smaller patterns often work best all-around.
- Coordinating with Textiles: Wallpaper and fabric share the room and should be carefully coordinated to have a relationship. They don't have to match, but they should share at least one color or tonal family. Solid or textured wallpaper can support a bold fabric, and patterned wallpaper often pairs best with solid or subtly textured upholstery.
- Always Sample First: Wallpaper looks dramatically different in a photograph than in real scale on a real wall. Always order a sample and tape it on the wall you intend to paper. Live with it for several days and observe it in morning light, afternoon light, and lamplight before ordering.
- Order Enough, then add a little more: Running out of wallpaper mid-installation is a genuine risk, as dye lots can vary between print runs. Always calculate your wallpaper needs carefully, add 15–20% for pattern matching and waste, and order all rolls from the same dye lot at once. This is not something you do every month or even every year, a little leftover is worth it.
Ready to Transform Your Walls?
Visit your nearest Calico to explore our wallpaper collection in person or browse online to order free samples or shop wallpaper.