Black Wallpaper

Choosing black wallpaper

Where it works

Black walls earn their keep in rooms you use at night or pass through quickly: a dining room, a downstairs loo, a hallway, the wall behind a bed. Daylight is not the enemy, but a small north-facing room papered in Midnight Bouquet, where black fills every gap between the blooms, will feel like a box. In that room pick a design that keeps some light on the wall, like White Anemone, where the leaves are pale enough to share the wall with the flowers, or Moonlit Willow, where cream and sage leaves cover the black almost entirely.

Picking between the designs

The choice is really how much black you want to see. White Vine and Silver Vine are fine white lines over solid black, so the wall stays dark and the pattern reads as texture. Peony Bouquet, Painted Bouquet and Ink Peony are the opposite: big blooms lit against the dark, the ground showing only in slivers. Between them sit the leaf designs, Rust Chrysanthemum with its slate-grey oak leaves and the Morris Fruit Dark, its lemons and pomegranates hung on charcoal. For something that is not floral at all, Bouquet Silhouette and Portrait Collage use cut-paper figures in black and white, and Bar Shelf and Apothecary Shelf line up bottles on dark shelving.

Related

The darkest florals also sit in dark botanical wallpaper and moody floral wallpaper; the graphic black and white designs in monochrome wallpaper. If the look you are after has a name, it is probably whimsigoth.