When Dinosaurs Take Over the Bathroom

In 1974, I found a bone in a sandbox.

I was a kid in the neighborhood, and I knew exactly what it was. So did every other kid on the street, once I showed it to them.

We had found a dinosaur.

We carried it from house to house. Every parent got the same announcement at the door: We found a dinosaur bone.

The parents looked, laughed, and sent us on to the next house, where it happened again.

It was a pork chop bone.

We didn't care. For one afternoon, we had found a dinosaur.

I thought about that afternoon while I was hanging House of Hackney's Dinosauria Ecru wallpaper in a children's bathroom in Birmingham, Michigan.

He didn't look at the seams

The room is the bathroom off a nursery. Stand at the vanity and you can see through the doorway to the crib, with a pair of framed dinosaur prints hanging above it.

Somebody in this house had a plan.

When the little boy saw the finished bathroom, he didn't notice the seams, the crown molding, or the place where the wallpaper meets the tile.

He started pointing.

He went around the room naming dinosaurs for his parents, one after another.

For a wallpaper installer, that's easy to miss. I spend my day thinking about layout, panel sequence, corners, windows, switch plates, and how a pattern moves around a room.

A child looks at the same wall and sees something completely different.

He sees dinosaurs.

And that was really the whole point.

Dinosaur wallpaper for a kids' bathroom—without making it look childish

Look at everything else in the room.

White vanity. White subway tile at the tub. A pale gray hexagon floor. White crown molding and casings. Chrome fixtures. An oval mirror on a pivot.

Nothing is cartoonish. Take the wallpaper away and you'd have a handsome, restrained bathroom.

Then you add one wild layer of dinosaurs.

That's what makes the room work.

You don't have to make every object in a child's room look like it was designed for a child. One extraordinary element can carry the personality of the room while everything around it stays simple.

House of Hackney's Dinosauria Ecru colorway is especially good at that.

The dinosaurs stand in a landscape of ferns, palms and grasses, drawn in muted greens and blue-greens against a warm cream background. From across the room, it almost reads like an old natural-history illustration.

Then you notice the stegosaurus.

And another dinosaur.

And another.

That's why I can see this paper working just as well in a nursery bathroom, an older child's bathroom, or a Jack-and-Jill bath shared between two bedrooms.

It has dinosaurs, but it doesn't feel temporary.

Can you put wallpaper in a bathroom?

People ask me this all the time.

Yes—but where the wallpaper goes matters.

In this bathroom, the tub and shower area are tiled to the ceiling. The wallpaper is on the regular wall surfaces: behind the vanity, around the window, above the toilet and around the doorways.

That distinction matters.

Wallpaper can work very well in a bathroom, but the room needs good ventilation, the walls need to be properly prepared, and the paper needs to stay out of direct shower and splash zones. On this job, the walls were primed with Zinsser Shieldz Clear before installation.

This room is a good example of using tile where the water is and letting the wallpaper do the decorating everywhere else.

House of Hackney also offers Dinosauria in a shorter version intended for spaces such as lower ceilings, half walls and areas above bathroom tile or a dado rail.

Four panels, a lot of corners, and a stegosaurus with a light switch

A quick word about who's writing this.

I'm a wallpaper installer and an owner-operator. I book the job, I install the paper, and I answer for the work afterward.

I also worked as a scenic artist for Feld Entertainment on Disney on Ice.

Scenic work teaches you something useful: a large image has to look right from across the room, but the details still have to hold up when somebody is standing two feet away from it.

That's very much what happens with wallpaper like this.

So when I look at this bathroom, I'm not seeing dinosaurs first.

I'm seeing panel sequence.

Dinosauria isn't a conventional repeating roll of wallpaper. House of Hackney describes it as a mural-effect wallpaper. One full-height roll consists of four panels, each about 45 centimeters (17 inches) wide, that line up side by side to create the scene.

That changes the way you think about layout.

With an ordinary repeating pattern, there is often some freedom to move the pattern around and decide where particular elements will land.

With a four-panel sequence, where you begin affects everything that follows.

Which dinosaur turns the corner?

What gets interrupted by a window casing?

What disappears behind the vanity?

What lands next to the tile?

And what happens when a dinosaur meets four light switches?

This bathroom had all of it.

Two doorways. A cased window. A tub alcove where wallpaper stops against tile. A vanity with a stone backsplash. A toilet. Towel hardware. An outlet. And a four-gang switch bank beside the sink.

Which brings me to the stegosaurus.

The stegosaurus at the light switches

The switch bank lands right across the animal's back.

So I covered the switch plates with the wallpaper and matched the pattern so the drawing continues across them.

The switches and screw heads are still there, obviously.

But the stegosaurus keeps walking.

I like details like that for the same reason I like matching wallpaper over a vent or another interruption in a wall.

Most people aren't going to walk into a room and say, “Look at that switch plate.”

Their eye simply keeps moving across the wall.

That's the point.

A couple of things to know before ordering Dinosauria

House of Hackney prints Dinosauria to order.

With a product like this, I want all of the wallpaper for a room ordered together rather than piecing the job together from separate orders later. Printed batches can vary.

The company also notes that with some digitally printed wallpapers—particularly darker colorways—a very fine light edge can sometimes be visible where panels meet.

Ecru is the light colorway, which makes it much more forgiving visually.

And because this is a four-panel mural-effect design rather than a standard repeating wallpaper, I would always think about the room layout before assuming how many rolls the job needs.

Another British wallpaper that came from Sweden

House of Hackney is a London design house.

But this wallpaper is made in Sweden.

That's something I've been seeing more and more on jobs here in Michigan: a British brand or international designer on the front of the sample book, with a Swedish wallpaper manufacturer behind the actual product.

I wrote an entire article about that shift called The Swedish Invasion.

This Birmingham installation is another example sitting right on the wall.

And Birmingham and neighboring Bloomfield Hills are exactly the kind of places where I see projects like this—nurseries, children's rooms, bathrooms and carefully designed homes where someone has found an unusual designer wallcovering and wants it installed properly.

I think that sums this bathroom up pretty well.

The dinosaur bone

I'm sure the parents on my street forgot about our dinosaur bone a long time ago.

I didn't.

I still remember how convinced we were that afternoon.

That's one of the great things about being a kid. A sandbox can become an archaeological dig, and an old pork chop bone can become the biggest discovery in the neighborhood.

Standing in this bathroom and watching that little boy point out the dinosaurs to his parents brought some of that back.

Sometimes it's a sandbox.

Sometimes it's a bathroom full of dinosaurs.

Barry Bernau is the owner-operator of Bernau Designs, specializing in high-end wallpaper and wallcovering installation in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and communities throughout Oakland and Wayne counties.