When faced with a blank wall, designer Tom Scheerer has a knack for devising novel treatments. We asked the celebrated designer (whose third book, Tom Scheerer: Still Decorating, was recently released) to spill the beans on his favorite techniques for embellishing surfaces that are anything but superficial.
IN THE ROUGH
For this grand Palm Beach dining room with 14-foot ceilings, he looked to the Fortuny damask-covered walls of Venetian palazzos for inspiration, then reimagined the opulent look with his own signature brand of relaxed elegance. First, he covered the walls in paper-backed burlap to temper the room’s stately scale, then turned the volume back up by having decorative painter Brian Leaver stencil a classic English Arts & Crafts pomegranate pattern on top.
A NEW LEAF
Channeling Carl Linnaeus’s iconic 18th-century bedroom papered with botanical prints, Scheerer wrapped this New York City breakfast room with digital prints of watercolors by João Barbosa Rodrigues, a 19th-century Brazilian botanist Scheerer’s been collecting for years. He chose about a dozen images from his portfolio (for a subtle repeat), had them resized to fit five prints high on the wall, and had his paper- hanger apply them individually for a collaged effect.
FRAMING DEVICE
For a card room in a Connecticut manse that connects two lushly patterned rooms, Scheerer chose a neutral grasscloth wallcovering but gave it presence by adding trompe l’oeil bamboo fretwork to frame a series of bird prints, for the feel of a sophisticated aviary.
CLOUD ATLAS
Scheerer adorned the walls of a child’s room with enlarged antique etchings of clouds, “inspired by the well-known Fornasetti wallpaper, but also by my own childhood memories staring out the window at the sky,” he says. The clouds were tinted in shades of gray-blue and periwinkle, printed at different scales, and arranged in a random patchwork.
From Tom Scheerer: Still Decorating by Tom Scheerer, © 2025, published by Vendome.
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 18 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
