Liberty Bird Guest Room Concept



Named for the elaborate Victorian Collectible’s ceiling papers, the Liberty Bird Guest Room is one of four bedrooms on the second floor and the most ornate room in the house. Gaslight Interiors went to great lengths to preserve every minute detail and vestige of the past that graces the Hardie-Brown home. The walls of the guestroom are made of the original lath and plaster, which our team restored by repairing all the structural cracks and reattaching sagging plaster to the lath with special washers. In the few places where the original lime and horsehair plaster were not salvageable, we replaced it with ¼” drywall nailed directly to the lath. This kept the reveal of the woodwork and prepared the walls and ceiling for wallpaper. The original ceiling wallpaper had been destroyed when it was painted with a stucco finish. The Dayle ceiling treatment is a combination of reproduction hand silk-screened heavy-duty wallpapers and borders. The liberty birds were trimmed and pasted onto the four corners of the ceiling. While we chose the wallpaper mainly for authenticity and beauty, it also hides the hairline cracks in the original plaster and provides better sound absorption than paint due to its thickness. As a soft floorcovering, we used a commercial-grade nylon reproduction carpet by Mohawk in an Axminster weave. This multi-colored floral bouquet pattern closely resembled the original carpet that was still in place, nailed to the fir subfloor.