We hang wallpaper in Lings, the NN3 neighbourhood built around Lings Wood about 3.3 miles north-east of Northampton town centre. Dean papers feature walls in the court terraces and fuller schemes in the bigger detached homes on Lingswood Park and around Crestwood Close.
A lounge with no chimney breast
Older Northampton houses often have a chimney breast that gives a paper an obvious home. The terraces and semis in the Lings courts were built in the late 20th century with gas central heating, and most of their lounges are plain rectangles. That changes how you choose where wallpaper goes. The usual options are:
- The wall behind the sofa, which is what you see when you walk in from the hall.
- The wall the TV sits against, if you want it to recede rather than stand out, using a darker, quieter pattern.
- The end wall of a kitchen-diner, to mark the dining area off from the kitchen.
- One bedroom wall behind the bed, which suits bolder papers that would be too much on all four sides of a small room.
Because these rooms are modest in size, the scale of the pattern matters more than the colour. A large repeat on a short wall can show only one and a half motifs, so we look at the repeat and the wall width together before you order.
Full schemes in the larger detached houses
Lingswood Park has larger detached family houses on bigger plots, some extended, and a four-bed detached house on Crestwood Close dates from 2016. Rooms here are bigger, and some owners want whole rooms papered rather than a single wall: a dining room, a main bedroom, or a hall and landing done in one continuous paper. Full rooms bring in the jobs that a feature wall avoids, such as cutting round sockets and window reveals, turning internal corners without losing the match, and planning where the final mismatched join will fall, usually behind a door.
What sits under the paper
The newer homes in Lings bring a specific problem. Builders usually finish new plaster with a thin contract matt emulsion, and paste does not grip that surface reliably. Before papering, those walls need washing, any shrinkage cracks filled, and either a size or a lining paper so the new paper bonds and can be stripped cleanly later. In an extension where the plaster is newly finished, the plaster has to dry out fully before anything goes on it, and we check that first rather than guess.
In the older court terraces the issue is more often previous decorating: painted-over woodchip, several layers of emulsion, or old paper with paint on top. That all has to come off or be made sound, because a heavy vinyl or textured paper will pull weak layers away from the wall.
Rooms on the woodland side
Homes backing onto Lings Wood sit under the canopy of the reserve’s chestnut and conifers, and the light coming into those rooms is filtered and slightly green. Pale papers with a cool grey ground can look flat or murky there, so it is worth looking at a sample on the actual wall at the time of day you use the room. Shaded rooms are also cooler, so we allow longer for paste to dry before furniture goes back. For help choosing tones that work in that light, see our colour and finish advice.
Our main wallpaper hanging page covers stripping, lining and hanging methods in more detail, and the Lings area page lists the rest of our work in the neighbourhood. Lings is about 3.3 miles from our Northampton base, and where a house has a drive, the paste table and steps come straight in from the van.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
