Mid-Century Modern Wallpaper

Mid-century wallpapers, and not a boomerang among them. What you get instead: blue and olive rectangles stacked high, rounded squares that drift from grey into coral, half moons on salmon. One has rings floating on petrol blue linen. Another has paddlers in conical hats. 1950s colours, drawn by hand.

Choosing mid-century modern wallpaper

Where it works

We'd hang these in plain, flat-walled modern rooms. A home office, say, or a hallway with a plain floor, or a bedroom full of teak and walnut. Low ceiling? Try Linear Block. Its vertical bars drag your eye upward, and the room stops feeling squashed. Rounded Squares and Half Moon are quieter (just two or three close tones, soft at the edges), so they'll sit behind a bed or run the length of a corridor without shouting at anyone. After dark it's Teal Geometric, our pick for a den or a dining room: cream and ochre rings on deep petrol blue.

Picking between the designs

Go by shape before colour. If you like a grid, that's Linear Block, or Retro Check, where slate blue and chocolate bands cross and blur into each other. Prefer circles? Teal Geometric or Half Moon. Rounded Squares has a warmer cousin in Orange Geometric, burnt orange ovals on off-white linen, and nothing here runs hotter. Two designs don't fit any group. Sky Stripe bends glossy sky-blue bands into hairpin arches. Geometric Paddlers is all angular figures in conical hats, rust-red paddles in hand, on sage green; we'd choose it for a wall that tells a story instead of repeating a shape. And Black Wave is rows of hatched swells in ink. No colour at all.

Related

More shapes live under geometric wallpaper, while the looser, painted ones are in abstract wallpaper. If you keep coming back to the warm end, it carries on in orange wallpaper. Wondering how a repeating grid actually locks together? What is a tessellating pattern walks through it.