Wonderful ways with wallpaper

With so many beautiful wallpapers out there, it’s no surprise it’s moved from design trend to design staple. Wallpaper is here to stay! Some of my favourite designs are too bold or too expensive for me to paper a full room with them so here are some ideas for incorporating wallpaper into your home, whether you want a little or a lot!

Wallpaper backsplash

One of my favourite ways to use bold paper is as a backsplash under glass. You won’t need very much making it a perfect way to use an expensive paper.

 

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In the bathroom

The bathroom is the perfect place for a little bit of humour, something special, something quirky…

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The kids’ room

These days some of the coolest home wares are designed for kids. That goes for wallpaper too.

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 An unexpected nook

I saved my favourite for last. Wallpaper can elevate an unexpected nook or corner from awkward or bland to wow! I would smile every time I walked past this corner.

Sandberg Raphael wallpaper – photo source unknown

If you live in New Zealand check out The Paper Room for an incredible collection of wallpapers. If you love mid-century and scandinavian design as much as I do, you can’t go past Lavmi’s collection available at Guthrie Bowron (and it’s affordable too!).

For more wallpaper eye candy hop on over to my Pinterest board.

The dark side – dark walls done right

Having complained about how gloomy our living room was when it was painted dark red, I actually think that dark walls can be fabulous- done right that is! Maybe because they’re brave and glamorous, whereas white is often playing it safe. One of my favorite blogs Yellow Brick Home just posted photos of their bedroom with dark walls. I’d definitely recommend checking them out. Any doubts you have about going dark will vanish, I’m sure.

 

Yellow Brick Home

Although I’ve heard of people using dark paint in naturally dark rooms, I personally prefer dark walls in rooms with plenty of natural light. The light brings out the subtle tones in the paint.

One of the best things about dark walls, is how they bring out the colours in art and textiles. Someone I know recently painted a dark wall in her house and every picture we held up against it looked fantastic.

 

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Dark walls can also bring out texture and pattern in monochrome schemes. Here it brings out the pattern in these wonderful bathroom floor tiles and this bedding. Both these rooms are more than the sum of their parts thanks to dark walls.

 

Left – souce and right – source

I would like to find a wall or two to paint dark in our house. I’ll let you know how I get on with that.

So what do you think? Have you gone over to the dark side yet?

 

 

Living room before and after

Here’s what the living room looked like when we bought the house (not our stuff). You had to have the lights on in the living room all day or it was too dark for anything except TV watching. That became a real problem when the light fitting broke on moving day!

I can see where the previous owners were going with this colour scheme. The red paint definitely gave the room a moody victorian feel and look at those ceilings! What you can’t see in any of the shots is that the sash windows are so large I can stand upright on the deep windowsill and have plenty of headroom. They really are magnificent.

We painted the room white (Wattyl classic white to be exact) and sanded the floors. Professional floor sanding seemed pretty expensive so we did it ourselves. By the end of that weekend the quote was looking very cheap indeed!

Look at that! No lights on! The only thing left to do is put a trim around the hearth stone, oh and move that picture up a few inches.

Here’s the other side of the living room. Unfortunately there’s no before shot of that but picture the same paint plus brass and peach glass wall sconces.

The sofa is from Nood, the rug is from Spotlight and the lights are all Ikea. There’s a lamp DIY I intend to make for the far corner and I’m still deciding on art. I think I need something bigger. So there’ll be more “afters” but for now I couldn’t be happier.