The Detroit Wallpaper Co.

"I ♥ Paris"

As Fall approaches, we are busily adding the final touches to our signature brand of wallpaper, The Detroit Wallpaper Co. DWco will launch in September 2012 with 70 original patterns in seven collections: METRIX (geometric inspired designs), Botanicals, FABric (textile inspired designs), Wallgazer (music, art, and pop culture influenced designs), Sprout (children's designs), and Heritage (updated takes on classic wallpaper designs). 

The seventh collection, Wander Walls, is one of our most innovative assortment if patterns. The pattern above, entitled "I ♥ Paris" is from the Wander Walls collection. The pattern is based on the Eiffel Tower's sturdy ironwork, reimagined as a soft lace. 

Other standouts from Wander Walls includes "Dia de los Muertos" uses traditional sugar skulls used to decorate graves as the basis for the pattern. "New York New York" uses famous architecture to transport the viewer to the Big Apple. 

"Dia de los Muertos"

"New York New York"

Design Center Installation

From left to right:  Houndstooth, Goldrush, New York New York, Amoeba Random, and Iso Love

We recently put up our new installation at the Michigan Design Center.  This is exciting for several reasons, but primarily because printed panels of our new lines are on display.   Pieces from the FABric, Wander Walls, and Metrix signature lines are cascaded in front of a vintage etching of Detroit.   The patterns are not yet launched on the website, Greatwallonline.com,  in a broader range of color schemes, so this allows designers to get a sneak peek and to order from our short-run wallpaper lines.

The other side of our display features images with our wallpaper in them, showing the Herringbone, and our Botanicals Mushroom and Willow.  Great Wall classics such as Disintegration is also featured. 

The Michigan Design Center is located at 1700 Stutz Drive, Suite 25 Troy, MI 48084

With the upcoming launch of 5 new signature lines, the atmosphere at Great Wall is extremely exciting right now.  Keep an eye out for more, as new designs and colors come out.

Matte Le Blanc

White walls are a great way to create an open space.  They are beautiful, and can make the accent pieces of your room really stand out.  But white walls don't have to be boring.  With subtle white on white wallpaper, you can add a really fun illusion of texture and play with the look of the room.   Working with neutrals is a great wall to use wallpaper in a small space without overwhelming the room. 

Image from Pinterest.com

The tufted white leather wallpaper is one of our new pieces from the FABric line.   Tufted white leather sofas , chairs, and ottomans are really hot in interior design right now.  The line consists of wallpaper with the appearance and inspiration of textiles.  As opposed to wall murals, the new Signature wallpaper lines, come in panels.

Great Wall's Tufted Leather Wallpaper

Image from Pinterest

Cellular grey is another great use of white on white.  A computer screen doesn't do it justice.  Printed, it has such beautiful, subtle gradients.  It's a really versatile pattern, and much like the tufted white leather, it works for a feminine or masculine decor. 

Polyvore set featuring Cellular Grey wallpaper.

Pantone 2012 Color of the Year: Tangerine Tango.

Great Wall is hopping on the Tangerine Tango band wagon.  Especially during winter, a fun color can really lift the mood.   The Polyvore set we created is fashion-oriented, but still features our Tape Deck wall covering from our Wallgazer collection.  This wallpaper has a street chic look to it.  It's fun for a teenager's room or a rec room, where you  might enjoy listening to some 80s music or playing Rock Band with the fam. 

Tangerine Tango Polyvore set from Great Wall

No matter how you decorate, this color can be incorporated into your decor.  Have a black and white room?  Try adding some flowers in this poppy red-orange hue. It would look great with Great Wall's new black and white houndstooth pattern, which is available in custom orders and will go on our website soon. 

Our "Drugs Saved My Life" wall covering/wallpaper also features a color very similar to Tangerine Tango.  This wallpaper was actually inspired by the book/movie "Prozac Nation".  

Drugs Saved My Life wall mural

Once again, all of our wallpapers can be custom  tweaked to fit your size, design, or color home decor needs.

Gloomy Grey Cheers Up

Today we found out that two of our staff are decorating our bedroom/guest bedroom with grey and yellow.   A perfect mural for this is the wallcovering "Balloons" from the Wallgazer collection.

From our Polyvore account.

This polyvore collage shows how to use these retro-inspired items in a modern way. By keeping the room achromatic with white, grey, and the occasional black, only a little yellow is needed.  Keep the whites in lacquer style, rather than a shabby chic, weathered-look. Mixing patterns is okay as long as you stick to a color scheme.  A cute,  patterned dog bed allows comfort and style for your loved ones.

from Design-Seeds.com

This inspirational pic from Design-seeds.com is helpful in keeping a limited color scheme without being boring.  It even allows for a subtle blue, which is featured in the "Balloons" wall mural. Not diggin the blue?  Great Wall can tweak the colors of any of our wallcoverings.

Detroit Home Awards

This year, Great Wall, has the privilege of sponsoring the Detroit Home Design Awards.   We will be a silver sponsor to the eighth annual award show.   The Detroit Home Design Awards  recognize and celebrate the top home  in the metro Detroit area.  This includes, interior, exterior, and decor.   Detroit Home Magazine provides information on interior designs, including furnishings,  home improvement, and parties.  You can also find little tips such as recipes and playlists for the season.

The Detroit Home Design Awards will be held on March 15th form 6-9 at the GM Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, MI.  You  will see some of our shining faces there.

Aloft Perspectives.

Looking for simple walls, but want to make your room exciting?  Try adding some excitement to the ceiling.  It's an unexpected surprise that will make your room the envy of your friends.  There options are literally limitless for this.

Use this with wallpaper to idea to create a simple ceiling without spilling paint everywhere, and getting a truly neat and clean look. 

via Pinterest.

This is an actual example of the Trompe L'oeil look that Great Wall has created for a client.  A mural was digitally designed and then applied to the ceiling using traditional wallpaper techniques. 

See other examples of Great Wall installations. 

Images on ceilings have been used throughout the ages from the Sistine Chapel 

to beautiful, intricate tiles of Turkey, Morocco, and much of the Middle East. 

Why not create a sky, whether night, dark, or whimsical.  This look can be perfect for a children's room or a  home theater.  

This image was found on likecool.com

The ceiling above, blows my mind.  It's so unique.  Great Wall offers full design services.  We are fine artists and Graphic Designers, so we can create something like this for you, without spending hours in your room, straining our necks.   Whatever you can imagine, we can create without fail. 

Is That the Prairie Look?

So the BBC TV show Absolutely Fabulous has a  new season.  

In the first episode, Eddie is wearing this really overdone "Prairie Look". 

 This has been inspiring our aesthetic and speech for the last few weeks.  I thought this was a perfect opportunity to showcase Great Wall's Wallgazer image  "Tsunami".  It is bold and versatile.  It has  a wooden-like background with a variety of colors that can be pulled into the rest of the room's color scheme.   This image was paired with some Mexican and Spanish decor.  Mix this interior with your favorite cactus cocktail. Don't be afraid to mix wood finishes.    

This collage image can be found on the Great Wall Polyvore set. 

Wallpaper DIY

As any craftsy or DIY-oriented person knows that everything can be used for more than one purpose.  This definitely applies to wallpaper.  Wallpaper doesn't have to cover an entire wall.   Here are some creatve ideas for how to think outside of the box or sometimes "inside the box"

This article at Apartment Therapy's blog will show you how to use your

favorite GREAT WALL print to upcycle your old bookshelf. 

The pic above shows you how to upcycle an old bookshelf to make organization fun and customized to your home.  How fun would this be using one of our Wallgazer Collection room coverings such as Gold Rush?  Gold Rush, and all of our patterns,  can be changed to any color scheme that fits your decor.  Our murals can also be ordered at any size. 

Great Wall WallGazer Collection - "Gold Rush"

Don't want to cover a full wall with a mural? Have some moulding you want to work around?  A great way to work with it is to add trim that works with the scheme of the room.

Use of trim around the mural.  This is taken from our wallpaper inspiration blog Customwallpaper4u.com

There is also framing your favorite mural.  Great Wall can print your favorite photo to fit the exact dimensions that you need.  We have printed for walls 100ft + wide, so the world is your canvas.

 Do you have a pic that you've wanted printed, but something is just a little off?  Great Wall offers full design services.  We can tweak that size, include custom text or photos, change the color, etc.  There is no limit to what we can do.

Great Wall Against SOPA

This image was created on Great Wall's Polyvore account.

We have chosen to feature our Binary Nightmare  custom mural from the Wallgazer collection today.  It's a really fun wallcovering  with 0s and 1s cascading down sporadically.   The binary nightmare wallpaper is a stylish way to play up your techy side, be you nerd or geek. Have a  loved one who's attached to his laptop?  He or She  love this in his home office.   It would also be really fun decor in an IT office.

We found these NERD bookends on Etsy.com

You may have seen that sites like Wikipedia.org and Reddit.com were down on Jan 18th in protest of SOPA and PIPA. These bills would essentially create large fines and jail time for posting any copyrighted material. You could be sued for something as simple as posting a fun picture of a cat on your Facebook. This wonderful blog would not be able to link to the youtube video for Chumbawamba's song "Tubthumping". The size of these fines are a true threat for small business owners, as well as the general public.  Click here to sign the petition against destroying the greatest communication tool ever created. 

Unleash the Hounds

On our wallpaper inspiration blog, our most popular concept has been Great Wall's over-sized houndstooth.  

I created this collage on our Polyvore account. 

With such a bold patten, you may think your decor options would be limited; not so. This wallpaper is amazing for mixing with simple white or neutral furniture.  Because it is achromatic, it's also great for contrast with your favorite color. Houndstooth checks originated in the woold cloth of the Scottish Lowlands. It has become an iconic pattern now, being used in clothing, phone covers, bags, hats, pillows, even nails. 

Sally Hansen Houndstooth nails by Anitza Valles Flicker

The book "Knoll Textiles, 1945- 2010" features a houndstooth skyline used as 

an advertisement for Knoll Advertising 1965.

The houndstooth is the first in a signature collection of fabric-inspired wallpapers that Great Wall has in the works.  Your favorite fabric textures will be printed on high-quality wallpaper in customizable colors. By creating it in such a large scale, this classic look is far from boring.  We will also be launching an aubergine version. Remember that all of our wallpapers are available in custom colors. 

She's Coming Out

Today, Great Wall installed a window display at Detroit's Motown Museum, "Hitsville USA".   We've gotten the honor of doing several installs and wallcoverings there.  The Museum is a special place because visitors can stand in "Studio A", the original recording studios where Motown's greatest hits were recorded.   Hitsville is truly special to Great Wall, because we are located in Ferndale, MI very close to Detroit, and we are so proud of the city's heritage.

This is the window installation by Great Wall

The Motown Museum is honoring Diana Ross because of the Lifetime Achievement Award that she will be receiving at this year's Grammys.    Diana was born at Hutzel Hospital in Detroit in 1944.   She has been nominated for 12 Grammys, sold over 100 million records, but this will be her first long-deserved Grammy Award.

Honest Abe

Last week,  we hired a great new guy named Abe to help out with production.  Abe has been a great new addition, with no fear of picking up the X-Acto knife and diving into the work. To welcome him, we put him on the spot with a quick interview in front of all of his co-workers today. So what did we learn? Abe likes the color blue, specifically royal blue.  He would bet on a shark over a crocodile in a fight, and Superman over Batman. He likes hip-hop, and has currently been listening to a lot of Wiz Khalifa. His favorite movie is the Quentin Tarantino hit, Pulp Fiction.

Here is Abe working next to Andi. 

Throughout our interrogation interview,  we found out that Abe's father used to run Clutch Cargo's, a concert venue in Pontiac, MI. Because of that, he met Green Day, Meredith Brooks,and Chumbawamba. When he was 10, he once crowd surfed at a Green Day concert, instead of staying where he was told. He broke four fingers, and subsequently can't close all of the fingers on his right hand together. Abe has an event-planning company. They throw hip-hop and electronic parties throughout the Detroit area.

You can find 3GB Detroit at http://www.facebook.com/3GBdetroit.

 

Feature of the Day: "Ameba" Wallgazer Wallpaper

At Great Wall, we print custom murals, banner, wallpaper; we even print those giant checks that people win at office parties. But we are all artists first. We can become inspired by fashion, books, nature, not just an Ikea catalog. We recently started a Polyvore account. Polyvore is a sight where people can take items, images, and create collages simple, artistic, editorial, etc. It originally began as a shopping site, but it is now also a way to express yourself. It is very in depth and addictive. It's a way to quickly get your aesthetic ideas across.

Within just a few weeks, people have really responded to our "Ameba" wallgazer wallpaper. It's a great neutral, because it isn't boring. It's really can help accent the crazy bright color of your choice. We are honored to see that people have found this so inspiring and versatile. We are taking some creative license with the spelling.

We created this one for our personal page. greatwall.polyvore.com The Amoeba wallpaper was great to show off some neutrals, and champagnes for ringing in the new Year.

New Year's Eve 2011 by greatwall featuring me & ro jewelry

This set pops with the orange lipstick. Love, Love. Could be used in a home with a bright orange lamp? orange decorative pillow?

Untitled #1182 by luvs10138 featuring a silk crepe dress

This one is feminine, airy. It has some great colors that could be used in a room with this background.

without you i am nothing by iwroteasongforyou featuring jean shorts