Does watercolour wallpaper have a pattern repeat?

Often not. Most of the painted murals we carry come as a 3.35m high panel, 1.295m wide, with no repeat at all, so the artwork builds once across the drops and never starts again. Some designs come as a roll that is itself a finished mural, such as Dune at 2.05m wide by 3.3m high. A small number are conventional 10m by 0.7m rolls with a true repeat, including Cloud, Botanic and Falling Feather.

Do you ship watercolor wallpaper to the United States?

Yes. Standard shipping to the United States, Canada, the UK and Europe is A$180 and arrives three to four weeks after dispatch. Express is A$280 and takes about ten business days. Samples ship for A$35. Prices display in your own currency and shipping is converted at checkout. Import duties and taxes are the recipient's responsibility.

Watercolour Wallpaper: Choosing a Painted Wall

Q: What is watercolour wallpaper?

Watercolour wallpaper reproduces a painting rather than repeating a motif. Instead of a pattern that starts again every half-metre, you see the bloom where two colours met on wet paper, the dry edge of a brush running out of pigment, and the tidemark left as a wash dried. Hung, it behaves less like decoration and more like a large, quiet artwork that arrives in lengths.

Watercolour wallpaper is not a pattern in the ordinary sense. Most wallpaper repeats a motif every half-metre or so. A watercolour design reproduces a painting — the bloom where two colours met on wet paper, the dry edge of a brush running out of pigment, the tidemark left as a wash dried. Hung, it behaves less like decoration and more like a large, quiet artwork that happens to arrive in lengths.

That difference matters when you come to order, because the format you are buying is often not a roll of repeating paper at all.

Three formats, and why the difference matters

Painted designs are sold in ways conventional wallpaper is not. Check which one you are looking at on the product page before you measure anything.

A single-composition panel. Most of the painted murals we carry come as a 3.35 m high panel, 1.295 m wide, with no repeat at all — the artwork builds once across the drops and never starts again. Wash, Sediment and Solar work this way.
A one-roll mural. Some designs come as a roll that is itself a finished mural — Dune covers 2.05 m wide by 3.3 m high in one composition. One roll is one wall, not one strip of a wall.
A conventional repeating roll. A small number are ordinary 10 m × 0.7 m rolls with a true repeat, which makes them the practical choice for wrapping a whole room rather than dressing one wall. Cloud, Botanic and Falling Feather are the three to know.

Get this wrong and you either buy four panels for a wall that needed one, or one roll for a room that needed six. Our measuring guide and the roll calculator both assume you know which format you are working with.

How much colour do you actually want

Painted designs run from barely-there to fully saturated, and the decision is easier if you think about it as depth rather than colour.

A pale wash gives you movement without commitment. From three metres away the brushmarks dissolve and you read texture, not pattern. Wash in its softest colourways and Breeze sit here.
A graduated wash holds pale at one end and deep at the other, which changes the proportions of the room. Sediment and Stratum do this — there is a separate guide to graduated designs because the hanging rules differ.
A saturated painting is the room's main event and wants the rest of the room to stay quiet. Aurora and Daybreak are painted at full strength.

Where painted walls earn their keep

Watercolour rewards rooms you sit still in. In a hallway you walk past the marks too quickly to read them; in a bedroom or a study you look at the same square metre for an hour at a time, and the variation is what stops the wall going flat. It is also unusually forgiving of an imperfect wall — a painterly edge does not advertise a bowed surface the way a straight line does.

Two practical notes. Colour shifts across a painted wall by design, so a paint match taken from one corner of a sample may not match the wall two metres along. And because these are reproductions of paintings, the $10 A4 sample is doing more work than usual — it is the only way to see how the pigment behaves in your own light.

Hanging a non-repeating design

A design with no repeat has to go up in the right order, because panel two is not interchangeable with panel three. Label the drops before you start and hang left to right as the maker numbered them. Our mural hanging guide covers the sequence, and wall preparation matters more here than with a busy pattern, because a soft wash will not hide a patched repair.

Ordering watercolor wallpaper from outside Australia

We ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand as well as within Australia, and the American spelling — watercolor — will find the same designs.

United States, Canada, UK and Europe: standard shipping A$180, arriving three to four weeks after dispatch. Express is A$280 and takes about ten business days. Samples ship for A$35.
New Zealand: standard shipping A$100, samples A$18.
Australia: standard shipping A$50, samples A$5.

Prices display in your own currency, and shipping is converted at checkout. Import duties and taxes are the recipient's responsibility. Our refund policy sets out the return terms for each country.

Not sure which format you need? Order a $10 sample, browse the full Emma Hayes collection, or email mary@wallpapertrader.com and we will work out the quantity with you.