Wallpaper & Wallcovering Installation

You can spend $200 a yard on hand-screened grasscloth and still end up with shaded panels, telegraphing seams, and shadow lines under raking light if the prep and hanging are wrong. Most of what looks like a bad wallpaper job is really a bad wall underneath it. Fresh drywall hung without a sizing or skim coat. Paste bleeding onto a delicate face. Seams butted instead of double-cut. Steve Cusimano started hanging wallcovering at 21, in a prince's palace in Saudi Arabia. Forty-two years later the same standard goes on every wall we touch. We do the unglamorous part right, the wall prep, the lining, the booking and relaxing of the paper, the repeat, so the material does what the designer paid for it to do.

• How much does luxury wallpaper installation cost?

  Most luxury wallpaper installations are priced per roll or per yard for labor, kept separate from the material, because the effort swings hard by product. Wide-width vinyl on a prepped wall hangs fast. Hand-painted silk or a sequenced mural panel takes far more time per drop. Wall prep, lining, and any repair are scoped on their own line. You get a firm number after we measure and confirm the goods, not a square-foot rate guessed over the phone.

• Do I need to prep or prime the wall before wallpaper?

  Almost always, yes. Prep is the part that decides whether the install lasts or peels. New drywall needs a skim coat and a sizing primer so the paper can be repositioned and later stripped without tearing the face. Glossy or previously painted walls need a de-gloss and a wallcovering primer for adhesion. The right prep for your substrate and your goods is in the estimate.

• Can you hang grasscloth, silk, and hand-painted wallcovering?

  Yes. Delicate and unpasted goods are most of what we do. Grasscloth and silk are paste-sensitive and shade from panel to panel, so we sequence the rolls off the run number, paste the wall instead of the paper, and keep every face clean. Hand-painted scenics and murals go up in numbered-panel order to the artist's layout. This is the work a general handyman should never be handed.

• What is double-cutting and why does it matter for seams?

  Double-cutting means cutting through both overlapped drops at once against a straightedge, then pulling the two waste strips so the panels meet in one tight butted seam. It is the difference between a seam you can find with your fingernail and one you cannot find at all under raking light. On thick or overlap-required goods like grasscloth and some vinyls, it is the only way to get a joint that disappears.

• Do you serve Sarasota and the rest of Southwest Florida?

  Yes. We install wallcovering across Sarasota, Venice, Englewood, North Port, Port Charlotte, and Punta Gorda for designers, hospitality properties, and luxury homeowners. We are based in the area and licensed statewide as CBC 1258403. Call (305) 797-5029 to check our schedule for your project.