DIY project: styling up the toilets/WC

A couple of weeks ago, I took Mila to France and spend a bit of time doing some DIY in our house no 1. The toilets have been annoying me for a while. They were not that bad since we had modernised the whole unit but still... not that exciting either and frankly unless you go to Le Kong in Paris, a bar restaurant designed by Philippe Starck & Laurent Taïeb, where you can see real creativity in the toilet (see photo below), then most toilets in our homes are pretty basic if not boring.

So I'm not Stark and I didn't have his budget either but I wanted to do something a bit different with this small room...
I was inspired by the bedroom of Shanna Murray who wallpapered her walls with pages from Pride and Prejudice (see post from last year) and also by the beautiful stylism of Sweet Paul for US Country Living (see below)

So first I stripped the walls from the wallpaper (1) then painted them in white (2)

I then selected a great book (I mean great with the layout of the page not the content..I will explain later) and started wallpaper the back wall with pages from the book. I only did one wall because this room is tiny and doing all three would have probably made it look even smaller.

From this.....

To this...

I just added a 'practical' message on a blackboard (it's a rental house and sometimes the obvious has to be stated!). So it's hardly as stunning as Stark's toilets but given the time and cost I'm very happy with the results.

Here are a few tips...
- Select a book with a good layout. Lots of books nowadays have the title of the book on each page which won't look good on the wall so go for a book with a nice, airy layout.
- Measure the area to wallpaper and the size of your page to work out the number of pages you will need. If you need 100 pages, go for a book which has 200+ pages (pages are counted on recto & verso but you will only be able to use one side. Pretty obvious but wasn't to me at the time until my smart mum enlightened me.....
- Get a varnish that doesn't turn yellow over the years and spray your wall once finished to protect the pages from water projections.
And then of course you can do this with pages from comic strips or from The Times etc or even pages with gorgeous women from glossy mags but I wanted to create a relax feel to it and it just worked out perfectly.