I Thought This Kitchen Had New Tile — It’s Actually Wallpaper

There are lots of things to love about DIYer Carrie Waller’s kitchen makeover: the cabinet paint (Clare’s No Filter) that brightens the room, the light fixture swaps, and the open wood shelving, to name a few. But I really love the wallpaper, which on first glance looks like tile. 

Carrie had stripped down the old, dated ivy-patterned wallpaper from the kitchen, but once she did that, it felt a little too minimalistic. “As much as I loved the new white-on-white aesthetic of our kitchen, I admit that it felt a little plain,” Carrie says on her blog. 

She wanted to try wallpaper again but was looking for something a little more contemporary and something that would mix well with the white square tiles that were already there. Enter: this “Candice”-patterned wallpaper, and Carrie says the photos don’t do it justice! “That curvy linear mid-century pattern really drives the point home that we love retro design,” she writes. 

She had the gray-green lines on her wallpaper custom-color matched to other wall paint in her home, Sherwin-Williams’ Sea Salt, and if you ask me, the repetition and horizontal orientation of the linear pattern makes it really look like tile. Carrie says she actually prefers adding wallpaper to a room over paint because of the instant pattern it adds, and I think this particular pattern acts and functions like a striking tile backsplash. 

One more trick up Carrie’s sleeve when it comes to this wallpaper job? She used the new curtain panels in the room as a dividing line. She didn’t want to wallpaper all the way into the seating area, and “this gave me an intentional place to stop the wallpaper,” Carrie says.

You can read about Carrie’s full kitchen makeover here, and you might also notice another bit of faux texture she added with wallpaper: the faux fluted wood island.