How To Choose Modern Wallpaper

By Marylou Sobel

Wallpaper is making a strong resurgence and it is easy to understand why. The days of staid, boring patterns or busy wallpaper on every wall that completely overpowers a room are long gone. Instead modern wallpaper choices are beautiful, luxurious, elegant, and funky. Papering one (or more) walls in a room instantly takes the room to the next level aesthetically. It adds drama and polish, and can even act like an artwork. Wallpaper changes the atmosphere of a room completely.

Here are my top tips for how to choose – and use – modern wallpaper.

1. Save papering all four walls for rooms that you want to be cosy, intimate but in which you do not spend all day, every day, like a study, or a guest room or powder room.

Wallpaper by Ralph Lauren

2. In other, high-use, rooms, choose a gorgeous print to highlight or frame a space, for example, a wall behind a bed or armoire, a wall behind floating shelves or even behind a sofa and side tables.

Wallpaper by Elitis

3. Use wallpaper in rooms where you want to add excitement, where other interesting features are minimal or, say, the architecture is a bit lacking.

Wallpaper by Designers Guild

4. The wallpaper pattern you choose should respect the room, its size and purpose, and its current furnishings but also the overall style of your home. If you disregard these things, you might end up with a room that feels chaotic and messy – the opposite of what you were aiming for.

5. Some interiors call for texture only, not pattern, in which case you cannot go wrong with grass woven papers. They bring a simple but sophisticated texture to a room.

Wallpaper by Phillip Jeffries

6. Many spaces will suit a pattern, but you need to choose the right pattern! Modern homes suit clean, modern prints, especially organic patterns, like flowers and foliage, stripes and abstract designs, and they also suit larger patterns. More traditional homes suit more traditional prints and washed out, aged papers.

Wallpaper by Eijffinger

7. You can have too much of a good thing! Strictly speaking there are no hard and fast rules, but I wouldn’t recommend papering every room in a house! Save the impact for a few key rooms.

8. My favourite rooms to paper are bedrooms, powder rooms and other intimate spaces like studies. It is the quickest way possible to give these spaces a 5-star hotel feeling. Papering an entrance way is a great way to create a sophisticated, even glamorous, first impression.

Wallpaper by Elitis

The essential key to choosing and using modern wallpaper – more important than any rule – is to choose a pattern that you love and that you want to be surrounded by every day.

My favourite wallpaper designers:
Cole and Son: https://www.cole-and-son.com/en/
Elitis: https://www.elitis.fr/en/wallpaper/
Eijffinger: https://www.eijffinger.com/en/products/category/wallpaper/16
Phillip Jeffries: https://www.phillipjeffries.com/
Designers Guild: https://www.designersguild.com/uk/wallpaper/latest-wallpaper-collections/l1116
Ralph Lauren: https://www.ralphlaurenhome.com/products/Wallcovering/
Arte: https://www.arte-international.com/