The Downstairs Loo

As you may remember, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the downstairs bath in my house. It’s pretty small, but it does have a walk-in shower and it’s the bathroom that gets used the most. I tried papering a bit of it with pages of old books, but they make it smell musty, which makes me crazy. I also thought about some large-scaled papers a few weeks ago, here.

On the way to High Point, I stopped in Richmond, Virginia at a place called Diversity Thrift. It’s about 15,000 square feet of everything. It’s gotten very high marks for its vast and ever-changing inventory. As I poked around, I stumbled across a bin of wallpapers, many of them unopened in their rolls. The name Nina Campbell caught my eye and so I grabbed the roll of paper.

To my surprise, it was exactly what I have been searching for! It’s a pale colour, an interesting print and it will match the shower curtain wonderfully. Even better, it was dirt cheap.

So I grabbed all three rolls and stuck them in my cart. When I finally got around to checking the price, I could only find it in pounds…£52 a roll, in fact! With today’s exchange rate, that’s about $87 per roll!

The print is called Woodsford, and is named after a castle in Dorset, England, which is owned by the Landmark Trust. The house has one of the largest expanses of thatched roof in England. It’s available for rent and sleeps eight!

The pattern is silhouettes of trees, similar to the Arbres de Matisse which Billy Baldwin used to great effect.

It also comes in a fabric. The pillow on the right is the same colourway as the paper I found. Here are some images from the catalogue.

I think I got a great deal and now I am excited to paper the small bathroom!

Oh, I also picked up a great blue & white tea pot, some books for the trip and a bag of crystal stoppers for decanters. I always find decanters without stoppers, and resist buying them, so now I have a selection from which to choose!