Options for accent walls: wallpaper, brick, and wood.

Interior Design

Three Ways to Add Some “Wow” to Your Walls

Are you bored with your plain white walls? Or maybe they’re not even plain white, maybe you have a painted accent wall that’s simply not enough of an accent anymore. Whatever it is, here are three options to add some new excitement to your spaces, with wallpaper, tile, and wood wall finish options.

March 10, 2020

Are you tired of your plain white walls? Walls don’t just have to be a coat of paint, and an accent wall can be so much more. There are so many fun interventions, and if these walls could talk, they’d tell ya all about it.

Fortunately, we designers speak that language, too, and we can interpret ways to add some “wow” to your walls, accent or otherwise.

Three Ways to Upgrade Your Walls

Wallpaper Accent Wall

Wallpaper has come a long way since the days of florals and damasks. Perfect for adding some punch to a powder room, or creating a statement wall in a bigger space, wallpapers are a great way to add some extra color, pattern, or even texture to a space.

Seward Park Gables – Board & Vellum
Wallpaper Taking the Place of a Headboard

An accent wall at the head of the bed helps anchor the bed in the room — a great look especially when your bed doesn’t have a headboard. While, up close, this wallpaper has verses written on it, from afar, it reads as a textural field.

This wallpaper offers some whimsy to this bedroom’s headboard wall, creating a designed space that reads well.

Tile Accent Wall

Tile walls don’t just have to be for kitchen backsplashes and showers. There are so many beautiful and unique tiles in this world, and it can make for a stunning statement wall. You can use tile to add color, pattern, or create added depth/texture to an otherwise blank white wall.

The Urban Sanctuary – Interior Design for a Condo – Board & Vellum
It Might Look Like Brick…

When it’s done well, it’s easy to be fooled by a great faux brick wall. To make it believable, you need a tile, like this one, that is actually the same material as brick, installed with grout you’d expect to see in a stacked brick wall. In fact, this brick is brick tile, less than an inch thick, applied to the wall as you would apply tile.

You can even do some cool faux looks. Take, for example, this bedroom. This condo has that chic urban look thanks to that brick tile. Yup, that’s tile, folks, not actual brick!

Wood Accent Wall

Wood paneling may bring up memories of 1970s basements, but today, there are more directions you can take wood walls than just a retro throwback feel. Shiplap, tongue & groove, beadboard… the list goes on!

Modern Kitchen in a Craftsman Home – Board & Vellum
Creating the Feel of Verticality

Not only do the vertical lines of this wood paneling add visual height to the room, but they reference the form of the addition to this home, where the same siding continues from inside to out.

You can run wood paneling horizontally to add more attention to the width of the room, or run it vertically to create more visual height, as we did in this dining room.

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