Five rolls of black masking tape, a folded cardboard template, and a bottle of Mod Podge, that’s the entire materials list behind a wall that strangers keep mistaking for designer wallpaper.
The first thing almost everyone did when they saw the post was ask for the wallpaper link. The pattern across the wall reads like a high-end Art Deco print, concentric hexagons cascading top to bottom, lines so straight they look machine-cut, depth so convincing each shape appears to recess into the plaster.
Then u/McCraylian, a certified construction tech, explained what they were actually looking at: five rolls of black masking tape, a piece of folded cardstock used as a template, and a coat of Mod Podge gloss to seal it. Total cost, under $20. The wall is inside a cramped, windowless 5×10 bathroom in a concept home, and it took him eight hours over three days to finish.
What strikes me most isn’t just the price tag, eye-catching as it is. It’s how confidently handmade the wall reads, and how completely it disguises that fact in photos. The comments on his post are full of people asking for the wallpaper link before they finish scrolling.
The Whole Thing Started as a “They’re Going to Demolish This Anyway” Experiment
The bathroom is inside a concept home scheduled for demolition in 2029. McCraylian’s instructor was sad to see an earlier backdrop he’d built get destroyed, so he promised something more permanent the next time around but with a catch. The budget had to stay small enough that nobody would feel bad about it disappearing in a few years.
That constraint is the whole reason this wall exists in its final form. Wallpaper was out. Paint felt forgettable. Tile in a windowless 5×10 was overkill. Tape, the same kind of cheap black masking tape you can find for a few dollars a roll on Amazon, was the only material that hit the brief.
“I have a few reasons. Mainly, because I could not brand wallpaper as my creation. I also don’t have much experience with installing wallpaper. This wall is also in a concept home that will be demolished in 2029.”
He’d been quietly doing tape work like this since 2021, when a client hired him for a job he had no formal experience for and told him to just do you. He’s been refining the technique ever since.
The Template Was a Piece of Cardstock Folded Like a Paper Airplane
The pattern looks complicated. It’s not. McCraylian folded a sheet of plain 8.5×11 cardstock into the shape of an elongated hexagon, basically the same folds you’d use to start a paper airplane, and that single piece of cardboard became the template for the entire wall.
He traced the template across the wall in a one-third offset rather than a straight grid, which is the small move that keeps the pattern from collapsing into a flat honeycomb. The slight stagger is what gives the finished wall its sense of vertical motion, your eye keeps wanting to read it as cascading shields instead of repeating tiles.
The outer outlines went up first, taped one shape at a time across the whole wall. That alone took a few hours and looked, in his own words, more like a chicken-wire test print than a finished design.
The Concentric Inner Lines Were Freestyled by Eye
Here’s the part that surprised me: every one of those nested inner lines inside each hexagon was done freehand, no template, no measuring.
“The fill-in lines are definitely by eye. After you do a few you will get the hang of the spacing.”
That confession is the real flex of the whole project. The lines look machine-precise in photos because the human eye is forgiving at that distance, but up close they wobble exactly the amount you’d expect from a hand on a roll of tape. McCraylian’s argument is that the small imperfections are the entire point, they’re what stop the wall from being mistaken for wallpaper in person, which is what would have happened if he’d used a stencil or a laser level.
A razor at each intersection cleans up the overlaps. The seams essentially disappear once the Mod Podge gloss goes on top.
Eight Hours, Three Days, One Cramped and Un-Air-Conditioned Room
The wall took roughly eight hours of actual work, broken across three days. McCraylian split the sessions because the bathroom is unventilated, windowless, and small enough that you can’t step back to check your progress without leaving the room entirely.
The bottom corners, by his own admission, were a test of patience. Anyone who’s ever tried to lay down a clean tape line in the awkward triangle where two walls meet a baseboard will recognize what he means without him having to spell it out. He prepped the wall with joint compound, sanded, primed, and painted before any tape went down, texture would have telegraphed through and ruined the optical illusion.
The Mod Podge Is What Makes It Permanent
This is the technical detail that separates the project from every other “tape art” Pinterest post: McCraylian sealed the entire wall with Mod Podge gloss. Once the adhesive on the tape strengthens under that topcoat, the wall is essentially locked in. Removing it later would mean stripping the sealer first, which is a job, not a quick weekend reset.
The gloss does a second job, too. It evens out the tape’s surface so the wall reads as one continuous geometric pattern rather than dozens of overlapping strips. Look at the close-up and you can see the layered depth doing what a good Art Deco accent wall is supposed to do, the concentric lines create the illusion that each hexagon is set back into the wall by a few inches.
The Comments Couldn’t Tell It Wasn’t Wallpaper
The most common reaction in the thread was some version of “I came here to ask for the wallpaper link.”
“You just stuck it on with tape? Before coming in, I had already prepared to ask you the link to the wallpaper. Well done!”
A reverse Google image search will, in fact, surface real Art Deco wallpapers that look strikingly similar to McCraylian’s hand-taped version. The difference is the price, those wallpapers run anywhere from $80 to $200 per roll, and you’d need at least two rolls plus paste plus installation time to cover a wall this size. He cleared the whole project for the cost of a casual lunch.
The Takeaway: Imperfection Is the Point, Not the Flaw
If you’re tempted to try a version of this yourself, McCraylian’s advice in the comments is to start small, grab a three-pack of black masking tape and a piece of poster board, sketch some patterns, and see what feels intuitive before you commit to a wall. He started exactly that way in 2021, with no formal art training, just a willingness to figure out the spacing as he went.
The bigger lesson the wall delivers, though, is that the most photographed-looking bathrooms don’t always come from the biggest budgets. Sometimes they come from someone with a folded piece of cardstock, five dollars’ worth of tape, and the patience to fill in 60 hexagons by eye in a room too small to step back in.
Project and photos by u/McCraylian, shared via r/interiordecorating on Reddit.
