Stairwells
How Much Wallpaper Do You Need for a Stairwell?
A stairwell is one of the trickiest rooms in the house to wallpaper, and one of the hardest to measure well: the wall running alongside the stairs rakes upward at an angle, a half-landing or turn in the stairs often splits it into two different heights, and the whole thing is usually taller than any wall in a standard room. Search "stairwell wallpaper calculator" and most tools that come up still expect one flat height for the whole wall, which a raked stair wall simply doesn't have. Here's how to measure a stairwell properly and land on a roll count you can trust.
Open the Wallpaper PlannerMeasure the raked wall to its tallest point
The wall running up beside a staircase rises at the same angle as the stairs, so its height changes continuously from the bottom step to the top. As with any sloped wall, measure to the tallest point the wall reaches and use that for every strip — you trim the excess off the short end once it's hung, rather than under-buying by measuring somewhere in the middle.
Split the stairwell at the landing
Most staircases have at least one half-landing or turn, and the wall above the landing is usually a different height again to the wall running alongside the stairs below it. Treat the landing wall and the stair-run wall as two separate sections with their own measurements, rather than averaging them into one number for the whole stairwell.
The stairwell is often the tallest wall in the house — plan access before you measure
A two-storey stairwell can run to 4-5m at its tallest point, well above what most people can reach without a proper ladder or scaffold tower. Confirm how you'll safely reach the top of the wall before you commit to a measurement — a number taken from halfway up a ladder, craning to see the apex, is exactly where a stairwell estimate tends to go wrong.
A tall wall wastes more per strip, even on a small pattern
Because each strip on a stairwell wall is unusually long, any offcut left over after trimming to the raked line is also long — and rarely reusable elsewhere in the job. Pattern repeat compounds this: a long strip has to accommodate more repeats of the pattern than a strip on a standard-height wall, so the waste from matching adds up over the wall's full height, not just at the top.
Order a buffer roll — re-accessing a stairwell mid-job is the worst case, not the best
If a stairwell wall runs short mid-hang, you're not just popping back to the shop — you're taking the access equipment down and setting it up again for one more strip. A stairwell is exactly the job where one extra buffer roll is worth ordering upfront, since the cost of running short is measured in hours of re-access, not just the price of the roll.
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See plans & pricingCommon questions
Is a stairwell wall measured the same as a sloped ceiling?
The principle is the same — measure to the tallest point and trim the short end — but a stairwell also usually needs splitting at the landing into two separate height sections, which most single sloped walls don't.
Can the planner handle a stairwell directly?
Yes — the room editor includes a stairwell template alongside rectangle, gable, sloped-ceiling and stepped-room shapes, so you don't have to approximate a raked wall with a straight one.
How many rolls does an average stairwell typically need?
It varies hugely with the wall's height and the number of landings, but a typical two-storey stairwell often falls in the 6-10 roll range for a standard 53cm-wide roll — closer to the top of that range with a larger pattern repeat.
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