Spruce Up Your Space With Designers' Fave Fabric and Wallpaper Patterns

“Scalamandré Zebras was designed for Gino’s Restaurant in New York City in the 1940s,” explains Barbara Karpf, president and founder of DecoratorsBest. “It was relaunched and has been one of our most popular patterns for years. This unique wallpaper creates excitement in a space and is ideal for powder rooms and guest rooms.” The deep red background fit the pattern’s original home perfectly, as one New York Times writer described it: “the zebras romp in a shower of spidery arrows over a veldt the color of a strawberry, a raw beefsteak, a Bloody Mary — a deep blush.”

Oklahoma designer Bailey Austin channeled pattern creator Flora Scalamandré's fancy-footwork-in-a-small-footprint by reaching for its gold colorway, which adds both polish and pizzazz to a narrow hallway between this home’s kitchen and dining rooms. In a space like this one, a gallery wall would rub shoulders (quite literally) with an awful lot of traffic; two-dimensional embellishment, by contrast, provides visual impact without the possibility of physical impact.

“I’ve used Scalamandré's zebras in a number of projects, each with a totally different design brief, and it always just works,” says Liz Caan of Liz Caan & Co., a Massachusetts-based interior design firm. “To pack the most punch without having to go all out with other objects and accessories, consider using the iconic print in a powder room. It’s the easiest way to make a statement without doing more than hanging wallpaper.”

“No matter the colorway, treat it as a neutral when outfitting the rest of your powder room (or any room),” Caan continues. Fair warning: Once this pattern goes up in your home, you might encounter resistance if you try to switch it out. In the ‘70s, a kitchen fire at Gino’s destroyed most of its wallpaper — and patrons called the restaurant to voice their vehement disapproval over the prospect of it being replaced. As the story goes, when Scalamandré recreated the screens to be ready for reopening, a mistake snuck into the pattern: the smaller zebra was missing one of its stripes. “The zebra looks like its pajamas are falling down,” Edwin Ward Bitter, then a salesman for the design business, told the Times. “But they had to go ahead with it. There was a deadline.” (Never fear, the zebras available these days are fully striped.)