Everything you need
How to measure a wall, how to hang non-woven paper, what our papers are made of, and how ordering, delivery and returns work.
Frequently asked
How to hang
Our papers are non-woven, paste-the-wall. That makes them one of the easier types to hang — no soaking, no waiting for the paper to expand, and a drop you can slide into place while the paste is wet.
Prepare the wall
Strip any old paper, fill and sand, then wipe the wall clean and let it dry. Bare plaster or new filler should be sized with diluted adhesive so it does not drink the paste.
Find your first vertical
Never trust the corner — houses are not square. Measure a roll-width out from the corner, subtract about half an inch, and draw a plumb line. That line, not the wall, is your reference.
Cut your drops
Measure the wall height and add a few inches at each end for trimming. If the design has a pattern repeat, lay the drops out and match them before you cut, so the pattern carries across the seam.
Paste the wall
Roll adhesive onto a strip of wall a little wider than one drop. Non-woven paper goes on dry — do not paste the back of it, and do not let the pasted area skin over before you hang.
Hang the first drop
Bring the paper to the wall from the top, align it to your plumb line, and let the extra paper overhang top and bottom. Smooth from the centre outwards with a brush or plastic smoother to push out air.
Butt the seams
Slide the next drop until its edge meets the previous one exactly — butted, never overlapped. Match the pattern first at eye level, then work the rest of the drop into place.
Trim and finish
Crease the paper into the ceiling and skirting with a smoother, then trim with a sharp blade against a straight edge. Change the blade often; a dull one tears. Wipe stray paste off the face immediately with a damp sponge.
Let it dry gently
Keep the room at an ordinary temperature and out of direct heat or draught. Forced drying is what makes seams open up.
If a wall is very tall, very damp, or covered in an existing finish you cannot identify, a professional decorator is money well spent.
How to measure
One number decides everything: the area of the wall. Measure it in feet, and the rest is just maths.
The formula we use
rolls = ceil( strips ÷ drops per roll ), minimum 1
A strip is one full-height length of paper, 21 in wide. Your wall needs as many strips as fit across it, rounded up. A 33 ft roll then gives you a whole number of those strips — and only whole ones, because a leftover tail is too short to reach the ceiling and too narrow to reuse. That is why a taller wall needs proportionally more paper than its area suggests.
Worked example
- A wall 12 ft wide and 9 ft high.
- 12 ft is 144 in across ÷ 21 in = 7 strips.
- Each strip is 9 ft (108 in) long, so a 33 ft roll gives 3 of them.
- Round up: 3 rolls — which is exactly what the cart will price.
Work out your wall
3 rolls
7 strips across, and 3 full drops off each roll.
Measure at more than one point. Ceilings sag and floors slope; take the greatest height you find and use that.
Do not deduct for an ordinary door or window. The offcuts around an opening are rarely reusable, and the deduction is how people end up a drop short.
A large pattern repeat wastes paper at every match. On a bold design, or your first attempt at hanging, buy one roll more than the formula says.
Materials & care
Non-woven paper: a blend of natural and synthetic fibres, more like a light fabric than a paper.
Why non-woven
It holds its shape, so it does not expand when wet and shrink as it dries — which is what opens seams on old-style pulp papers. It goes up dry onto a pasted wall, and it comes off in whole strips when you want a change, without steam or scraping.
Finish
Every design is printed with the same matt, low-sheen face. Matt hides an imperfect wall and looks soft in daylight, where a gloss would bring out colour under lamps but show every bump beneath it — which is why we do not offer one.
Care
Dust with a dry, soft cloth or a vacuum brush head. For a mark, blot gently with a barely damp cloth and no detergent — never scrub, and never use a cream or solvent cleaner on a printed face. Keep it out of standing steam; a bathroom or a wall directly behind a stove is not the place for a decorative paper.
Colour and light
Every screen shows colour differently, and so does every room. Nothing you see here — in the grid, on a product page, or in the Live Studio — is an exact colour match. Preview it in the Live Studio on your own wall, in the light it will actually be in, before you buy.
Shipping & returns
Dispatch, delivery and returns
Papers are printed to order and ship boxed and upright so the edges stay square. Delivery options and costs are shown at checkout, based on your address. Because every roll is printed for your order we cannot take change-of-mind returns, but if anything arrives damaged, faulty or not what you ordered, raise it within 5 days of delivery and we will refund or replace it. The full terms are on our Shipping & Returns page.
Order enough in one go
Paper is printed in batches, and a roll ordered later may be a slightly different shade. Order every roll for a wall together, and add a little for pattern matching and trimming — the product page's calculator does this for you.
If an order arrives faulty
Check every roll against the batch number before you hang a single drop, and stop at the first sign of a fault. Once a paper is on the wall, it usually counts as accepted — the time to report a problem is while the rolls are still unopened on the floor.
About Atelier Surface Couture
Atelier Surface Couture began with a simple frustration: you cannot judge a wall from a thumbnail. A pattern that looks lovely at thumbnail size can overwhelm a room, and a colour that looks right on a screen can turn cold on plaster. So we built the shop around the one thing that actually settles the question — a preview that shows the design on a photo of your own room at real size.
The collection is deliberately small. Every design is drawn as a seamless tile, so it repeats without a visible grid, and every one is made to sit quietly in the background of a room rather than fight with it.
Every roll is printed to order on non-woven stock, so you buy only what your wall needs. Have a design of your own? Upload it in the studio and we'll size it to your wall.
How an order works, start to finish
From payment to a finished wall: up to 2–7 days — printing, delivery and fitting included.
Find a paper you like
Filter the collection by room, colour or style. Every design is drawn as a seamless tile, so it repeats across a wall without a visible grid. Browse the collection.
See it on your own wall
Upload a photo of your room in the Live Studio and the design is shown on it at its true printed size — not as a thumbnail, and not scaled to look flattering. This is the step that settles it, and it costs nothing.
Tell us the wall, we do the arithmetic
Enter the width and height on the design's page. We work out how many strips your wall takes and how many come off a roll — including the paper lost lining the pattern up at each seam — so the roll count is the real one. How to measure.
Place the order
Pay by UPI, card, net banking, wallet or EMI. We deliver in Bangalore only.
Your rolls are printed
Nothing sits in a warehouse. Every roll is printed for your order on non-woven stock and boxed upright so the edges stay square — which is also why we cannot take a change-of-mind return once printing has started.
We bring it to you
Delivered by hand across Bangalore, not handed to a courier. That is the honest reason we work in one city rather than shipping nationwide.
And we hang it, free
Fitting is included when the paper came from us — not a discounted rate, not a first-wall offer. One team supplies the paper and hangs it, so there is nobody to disagree with about a seam. How installation works.