How to Test a Wallpaper Sample

Last updated: 11 September 2026

The temptation, when a wallpaper sample arrives, is to decide on the spot, standing at the kitchen bench under a harsh downlight. Give it a week on the wall it was chosen for and it will answer most of the questions worth asking before a single roll is ordered.

Start at the wall

Take the sample to the room it is meant for. A paper that looks right in a sunny kitchen can look dull and dark in a south-facing bedroom. Hang it upright, as it will hang, at eye level, and fix it with low-tack masking tape, since sticky tape and Blu Tack can both mark paint. Check the product photograph so the design is the right way up, because trellises and trailing flowers have a direction of their own.

Then move it about. The same paper beside a window and in the darkest corner of the wall often looks like two different papers, and the corner shows you how dark the colour can get.

Follow the light

Look at the sample in the morning and again at night with the lamps on, when most colours look warmer and darker, and bear in mind which way the room faces. In Australia and New Zealand, north-facing rooms take the most sun, which makes colours look warmer, while south-facing rooms have a cooler, softer light that makes them look greyer. East-facing rooms are brightest in the morning and west-facing rooms in the afternoon. Much of the advice written overseas assumes the opposite hemisphere, so swap north and south when you read it.

Check it under your own light globes as well. Warm white globes, marked 3000K or lower on the box, make a colour look softer and more yellow; cool white and daylight globes, at 4000K and above, make it look cooler and bluer.

Stand to one side, too, so the light skims across the surface. Texture and shine show up best at an angle, and metallic inks catch the light differently as you walk past, which is how you will see the wall on most days.

Give it a week

Leave the sample up for a week and see how you feel about it as you pass each day. If you still like it at the end of the week, that is a good sign. Where you have several contenders, put them up side by side and take down the weakest each morning until one remains.

Hold it against what stays

The floor, the benchtops, the joinery and the curtains are all harder and dearer to change than a wall, so hold the sample against each of them in turn, and against the largest piece of furniture in the room. Pin it beside a paint chip and a scrap of the curtain fabric, as a decorator would on a mood board.

Choose the paper before the paint. Paint can be mixed to almost any shade and most paint shops will colour-match from a sample, so take it with you when you choose a colour for the trim or the neighbouring walls.

Look hard at the whites, too. A paper with a creamy background beside a brilliant white skirting board makes one of them look grubby, and the skirting is the easier of the two to repaint.

Judge colour by eye, in the room. Phone cameras adjust white balance on their own and every screen shows colour a little differently. Take a phone photo anyway and switch it to black and white. It shows at once whether the paper is lighter or darker than the furniture and the floor, which is hard to judge in colour.

Check the pattern

An A4 sample is about 30 centimetres tall, and many patterns repeat over a much longer drop. Compare it with the pattern repeat on the product page. If the repeat is longer than the sample, you are looking at a fragment of the design, and the room photographs will show you the whole of it. A mural sample is likewise a small section of the image, there to show colour and print quality.

Then step back to the doorway, which is where you will see the wall from most of the time. From there, a small print can blur into what looks like plain texture, and a bold one looks busier than it did in your hand.

Do not rule out a large pattern for a small room. In a powder room or a reading nook, a big pattern repeats only a few times on each wall, so you see each motif whole. The room photographs on each product page show how big the pattern looks on a real wall.

Note the match as well. The product page says whether a design is a straight match, where the pattern lines up across each drop, or a half-drop, where every second drop steps down by half a repeat. A half-drop sets the motifs on a diagonal and takes a little more paper; the calculator on the product page allows for it.

How the room is used

For a hallway or a child's bedroom, check the care details for the design, then wipe a corner of the sample gently with a barely damp cloth to see whether the surface marks or smudges. Bathrooms and kitchens are harder on wallpaper, because steam and splashes suit some papers better than others. Email us the design name before you order and we will tell you whether it will cope.

While the sample is up, look closely at the wall around it. Cracks and old paint ridges can show through wallpaper, particularly a smooth or glossy one, so allow time for preparation if the wall needs it.

Before you order

Write the design name and colourway on the back of the sample the day it arrives. Many designs come in colourways that look almost identical on a screen, and you will want to order exactly the one you tested.

Measure while the sample is still on the wall, taking the width and height of every wall you plan to paper in metres, along with the size of any windows and doors. Roll sizes and pattern repeats differ from one design to the next, so use the calculator on that design's product page.

Show the sample and the product details to your installer. They will want to know how the paper is hung, and they will plan where the pattern starts so that a key motif is not sliced through at the ceiling line.

Order every roll at once. Wallpaper is printed in batches, and colour can shift slightly from one batch to the next, so a single order gives your rolls the best chance of coming from the same print run. Check that the batch number on each label matches before anything goes up. Your sample may have come from a different batch, which is why a very slight difference between sample and roll is normal. A spare roll from the same batch will cover a mistake on the day, or a repair years later when a new batch may not match.

Once the paper is hung, keep the sample with one of the roll labels. Between them they hold the design name and the batch number, and they are the best reference you will have when you come to choose cushions or order more.

If it isn't the one

If the sample disappoints, work out exactly why. Perhaps it makes the room darker than you pictured, or its colour clashes with the sofa. Send us a photograph of it on your wall and we will suggest a few designs that fix it. A sample you love, even one that was wrong for the wall, can be framed or used to line a drawer or the back of a bookcase.

If you have not ordered a sample yet, Why Order a Sample First explains what one can tell you. For help narrowing down a shortlist, email hello@wallpapertrader.com.