From Sketch to Installation: Designing Custom Toile Wallpaper for the Warhawk Air Museum
Stacie HumpherysSome projects arrive with a clear brief and a tight timeline. Others arrive with something harder to define: a sense of weight, of responsibility, of wanting to get it exactly right.
The Warhawk Air Museum project was the second kind.
I should say upfront: I am not a stranger to this museum. I have been working with the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, Idaho since 2020, developing their mobile app and interactive kiosks and using my STEAM background to help teach STEAM concepts to kids in their education programs.
I love this place. I love the people. I love what it stands for. The Warhawk is dedicated to preserving military history and honoring those who served, and they do it with extraordinary care. Their Kilroy Coffee Klatch -- a monthly gathering where hundreds of veterans come together over coffee to share stories, find community, and support each other through the hard parts of coming home -- is one of the finest things I have seen any institution do for the people it serves.
When they asked me to design wallpaper for the new Global War on Terror Wing, it was the first time my day job and my museum work had ever overlapped. I wanted to do it justice.
The weight felt different on this project than it would for a residential or hospitality commission. The GWOT is not finished history. The veterans who served in it are alive. Some of them were going to walk through that room.
Here's how it came together.
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Concept & Research | Sketch & Illustration | Color & Scale | Production & Printing | What This Project Taught Me | Custom Toile Wallpaper for Your Project
Phase 1: Concept & Research
Before a single sketch was made, I spent time inside the museum's as-yet-unopened GWOT hangar. Walking the floor. Reading the placards. Listening to the stories embedded in the artifacts.
Good wallpaper for a cultural space doesn't decorate around the collection. It extends it. My goal from the start was to create something that felt like it belonged: that a visitor might walk past without consciously registering it as designed, but would feel the difference if it weren't there.
I researched the visual language of the era: technical illustration styles, military insignia conventions, the color palettes of wartime printing. That research became the foundation everything else was built on.
The choice of toile as the format was deliberate. Toile de Jouy was developed in 18th-century France as a documentary format: a way of illustrating specific events, specific people, and specific places in fine line illustration across a repeating surface. Revolutionary War toiles documented military campaigns. Hunting toiles honored the traditions of the landscape where they were made. From the beginning, the format was designed for storytelling, not decoration. Using it to tell the story of the Global War on Terror felt historically correct, not just aesthetically fitting.
It is also one of my favorite styles to design in, precisely because toile demands narrative clarity. Every motif has to earn its place. Every scene has to contribute to the story. There is nowhere to hide behind pure decoration -- and for this project, that constraint was exactly right.
If you are working on a space with a story worth telling, custom toile wallpaper is one of the most powerful formats available. I develop custom toile designs for hospitality interiors, cultural institutions, boutique hotels, and residential clients. See how that process works.
Phase 2: Sketch & Illustration
My illustration process is always hand-driven first. Working digitally from the start tends to produce work that feels clean but cold, and cold was exactly wrong for this project.
Accuracy to the period was non-negotiable. I worked closely with Carson Spear, the museum's Executive Director, who served in Iraq and provided reference photos to make sure every motif was technically correct. Carson earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart during his service, and has his own cabinet display in the GWOT hangar. Having someone who was actually there looking over every sketch made the work better and more honest than I could have made it alone.
Early sketches explored motifs pulled directly from the museum's collection and history: aircraft silhouettes, navigational elements, period equipment, and the kinds of details that reward a second look. I wanted the work to function at two scales: readable across a room, and interesting up close.
In a museum environment, where visitors may spend extended time in a space, that depth matters. A wall shouldn't be something you glance at once and dismiss.
Iterations moved from loose sketches to refined line work, with each round of review asking the same question: Does this feel true to the history it's representing?
Traditional toile is rendered in fine line ink, which gives it a graphic, high-contrast quality. For this project I made a deliberate departure: I rendered the motifs in monochrome watercolor instead. The wash softens the pattern, giving it a quieter presence on the wall -- it settles into the room rather than competing with the artifacts and exhibits around it. But up close, the detail is there. The texture of the brush. The specificity of each motif.
I wanted visitors to walk past and feel the atmosphere of the space, and then stop and be surprised by what they found when they looked closer.
A note on placement: this wallpaper lives in the GWOT Wing restrooms. That might sound like an unlikely home for something so carefully considered, but toile has always thrived in small, intimate spaces, and there is something quietly perfect about a visitor stepping away from the exhibits, finding themselves alone with these illustrations, and taking a moment to really look.
Some of the most meaningful design encounters happen in unexpected rooms. The feedback from visitors who discovered the detail in that context has been one of my favorite parts of this project.
Phase 3: Color & Scale Decisions
Color is where museum work gets technically demanding.
The palette needed to feel authentic without being so muted that it disappeared into the exhibit environment. Coyote Brown, an official military color used extensively in GWOT, was the color we decided on.
Scale decisions are equally consequential in institutional spaces. A repeat that reads beautifully in a residential dining room can feel busy or fragmented on a 20-foot run of commercial wall. I adjusted motif sizing and repeat spacing specifically for the scale of the installation environment, a step that requires thinking about the wall as architecture, not just as a surface.
This is where my engineering background earns its place. Understanding how a pattern will behave at full scale, how seams will fall, and how the eye will travel across a large expanse isn't intuitive. It's technical. Getting it wrong is expensive. Getting it right is invisible, which is exactly the goal.
Phase 4: Production & Printing
Production for institutional projects requires a different level of rigor than residential work. Files need to be prepared with precision: correct colorspace, accurate repeat dimensions, appropriate resolution for large-format output.
The restroom placement also made the substrate decision straightforward. Commercial vinyl wallpaper is the correct choice for any high-humidity, high-traffic institutional space: it is scrubbable, moisture-resistant, and built to hold up in exactly the environments where lesser substrates fail.
For hospitality and institutional clients, commercial vinyl is almost always the right answer for bathrooms, entryways, and any space that sees heavy use. It also happens to print beautifully.
I worked through Spoonflower's commercial production pathway, which allowed me to maintain quality control through sampling before committing to full production runs. Sample reviews are non-negotiable on a project like this. What looks correct on screen and what reads correctly on substrate are often two different things, and there is no substitute for holding the physical material in the space it will inhabit. For larger institutional projects, Spoonflower's trade program is worth asking about.
Final files were delivered production-ready, with full documentation for installation.
What This Project Taught Me
The best interpretive design for cultural spaces is an act of service. The designer's voice should be present but never dominant. The history, the collection, the visitor experience: those are what the work is in service of.
I understood that intellectually going in. The opening on September 12, 2025 made it real.
The GWOT Wing's exhibits were not fully installed when I was designing the wallpaper. I had researched the era, worked with Carson, drawn from the museum's collection -- but I walked into that opening not knowing everything the room would hold. One of the first things I found was Carrie French's cabinet.
Carrie French was 19 years old and from Caldwell, Idaho, right next door to Nampa. She was the first female soldier killed in Iraq. She died on June 5, 2005, when an improvised explosive device struck her convoy vehicle in Kirkuk. I remembered when she died. Standing in front of her cabinet, with the wallpaper I had made on the walls around it, was one of the most grounding experiences of my professional life. This is why we tell these stories. This is why it has to be done carefully and with honor.
The rest of that day confirmed what I already felt. Watching first responders walk through the museum's 9/11 exhibit was one of the most quietly moving things I have witnessed. And hearing veterans' reactions to the wallpaper itself stayed with me: helicopter crews recognizing their aircraft, spotting details from their own service in the pattern. The museum already knew the A-10 Warthog is my favorite airplane of all time. Apparently that came through in the illustration.
On October 7, 2025, the museum invited me to the Kilroy Coffee Klatch. Standing in front of a room full of veterans to receive an award of thanks from Carson and the museum was one of the most humbling moments of my professional life. The Kilroy Coffee Klatch gathers hundreds of veterans every month -- not just to honor their service, but to give them a space to talk, to connect, and to help each other heal. If you are looking for a way to support veterans in the Treasure Valley, the Warhawk is a place worth knowing about.
Custom Toile Wallpaper for Your Project
Toile is the right format when a space has a specific story to tell and you want that story woven into the walls rather than hung on them. It works particularly well for hospitality interiors that want to reflect a sense of place, cultural institutions building an interpretive environment, boutique hotels with a strong regional or brand identity, and residential clients with a story worth commemorating.
A custom toile commission at Pine + Feather Studio starts with research: understanding the space, the narrative, and the audience who will spend time there. From that foundation, every design decision follows -- the motifs, the scale, the palette, the structure of the repeat. Illustration is hand-driven throughout, and where accuracy matters, I work directly with subject matter experts, as I did with Carson on this project. The engineering background means the technical production decisions are handled with precision: correct colorspace, accurate repeat dimensions, the right substrate for the installation environment.
Commissions are available in traditional paper, pre-pasted, peel and stick, and commercial vinyl for contract and hospitality applications. Custom colorways and custom scale are available for the right projects.
If you are designing a space that deserves something more than off-the-shelf wallpaper, I'd love to hear about it. See how the process works or start a conversation.
Pine + Feather Studio creates custom toile wallpaper, story-driven soft goods, and interpretive design experiences for cultural institutions, hospitality interiors, and high-end residential projects. Start a conversation
