5 original ideas for decorating living room walls
03.2022
Never underestimate the power of walls when you are thinking about your living room décor
5 ideas for stylish living room walls
With so many things to think about when renovating a home or planning a makeover, it can be easy to focus on the bigger items such as furniture, colour schemes and flooring, and neglect the walls. However, blank walls can often create a sterile, bland feeling, so they merit their fair share of attention on the décor front.
Walls also offer a great canvas for you to display your taste and personality, and how you decorate depends on these factors, together with the overarching colour scheme and style of each space. You might then opt for a tone-on-tone effect that subtly adds depth and movement, or choose contrasting, more striking elements that stand out from the walls themselves.
If you want to optimise the walls of your living room and create a stylish and hospitable environment, you’ll find 5 simple but inspiring ideas to help you do just that in this article.
3 things to keep in mind
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to decorating living room walls, but there are 3 general guidelines to keep in mind:
- Delicate colours
- Harmonious style
- Just a few elements
First and foremost, you need to remember that subtle tones create a sense of serenity and avoid overwhelming the senses. If you are a lover of bold colour, it’s best to use these either for furnishings against an overall neutral or pale colour scheme or to create a single feature wall.
However, if you do opt for the latter, ensure that it works in harmony with the total look of the room so that you end up with a cohesive style.
One of the main mantras of modern interior design is that less is more, and this also applies to wall decorating, so if you are aiming for a contemporary, elegant look, follow this advice and select just a few, perfect pieces that fit the style of your entire home.
Stylish solutions
Before you set about decorating bare walls, think carefully about their length and the size of the room, as this will help you strike the right balance between too empty and too cluttered.
For a minimalist contemporary look that adds a sense of dynamism to the room, the two most common solutions are alternating full and empty spaces or creating asymmetric compositions.
You can then play to your heart’s content, for example mixing useful and whimsical objects, opting for a combination of stylish and functional or simply choosing elegant items that serve no purpose other than to occupy wall space and inject a touch of personality into the environment.
There really are a myriad of possibilities when it comes to decorating your walls, but to start the ball rolling, we’ve put together 5 examples of solutions for elegant modern living rooms.
Play with texture
A good place to start is the choice of wall covering and instead of a painted surface in a single colour, this is a great opportunity to introduce texture.
Natural stone is the perfect solution, as it can radically change the entire look and feel of a room, particularly if you choose a distinctive pattern. We believe stone is already an extraordinary material, so our approach is simply to give it a subtle but elegant twist. This also makes it easy to combine textures as they work in harmony together, rather than competing for the eye’s attention.
This room is the perfect example of this, with a mixture of our Rain and Tratti. The former is used here as a stone interpretation of traditional wood boiserie or wainscoting, creating a discreet, elegant base for the combination of honed tiles accented by gold-coloured accents that make up Tratti.
Using just one colour in the form of the dark brown tones of Pietra d’Avola limestone, these two very different textures nevertheless work beautifully together to create a truly stylish wall.
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Mirrors are always a fantastic decorative element, not only for their primary function and their ability to improve the light and perspective of a space, but also for their aesthetic value if you choose carefully. This makes them the ideal décor item for a wall.
The bigger the better if you want to make your living room appear larger and brighter, and they find a perfect home above larger items of furniture such as a sofa, cabinet or low sideboard, while hung above a side table they will add another dimension to any objects placed upon it.
If you have a large living room and space is no issue, you can also simply choose to lean a large mirror against the wall, such as in this image featuring the largest piece from our Quadro collection. With its deep frame in burnished brass, it makes a striking but elegant statement and can be hung vertically or horizontally.
Home is where the art is
When faced with a blank wall, the obvious solution is to decorate it with pictures, and why not? The trick here is to create a dialogue between the artwork and a key item of furniture to create a sense of balance in the room. For example, you might choose to hang a series of pictures above a sofa or close to a table.
Our Home Collection features the Intarsi series of wall art, the perfect solution if you are looking for a stylish way to bring your living room wall to life. With a range of shapes, sizes and bold geometric designs, you have plenty of scope for creating striking and original compositions.
The common theme tying each piece together is the contrast of cool white Bianco Carrara marble and dark Pietra d’Avola limestone, which work together in an elegant juxtaposition that hits the perfect stylistic note in a modern context. Here, for example, they deliver a dramatic effect in this elongated layout that follows the lines of our Pliss sideboard and adds a sense of depth to the entire space.
Practical and stylish
If art is not your thing, there are other ways to ensure a wall doesn’t look bare and sterile and this is by placing stylish furniture along it, making it both functional and eye-pleasing.
Options include wall-mounted pieces, which are very much in line with modern design trends, or you might choose items such as freestanding cabinets, drawers and shelving units.
These are all excellent alternatives that don’t take up too much space and inject an elegant, practical element into a room. Our Pliss sideboard, which we saw in the previous example, fits the bill perfectly. Sitting atop slender metal legs, its facing in textured stone conceals a series of deep drawers, while its smooth top in matching stone is the perfect surface for displaying photos and stylish accessories for an additional decorative touch.
Go green
A classic and extremely practical solution to liven up a wall is to add a simple shelf that can hold whatever decorative or practical items you decide upon, depending on the season, the room’s look or even your mood on a particular day.
As always, however, we would caution against going over the top if you are trying to achieve a modern décor, so don’t fill the wall up with shelving. If you are a fan of the symmetrical approach, you may wish to position them one above the other in a perfect vertical line, but you could also opt for a more random layout, choosing different types and sizes of shelves and placing them as you wish.
Our Linea shelves would be an excellent choice as they are not only simple and elegant, but also come in a range of different stones if you want to mix things up. Then, simply add books, ornaments or plants.
On that note, greenery is the perfect way to quite literally bring a wall to life and introduce a natural element to the entire space. If you don’t possess green thumbs and don’t trust yourself with pot plants, why not create compositions of flowers or single leaves in designer vases such as those in our Pietra L10 range, which combine blown glass with gorgeous stone.
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