Multicolored Wallpaper

Choosing multicolored wallpaper

Where it works

A wallpaper with six colours in it is the easiest thing to decorate around, because whatever you already own will match something. That makes Pressed Blooms, Painted Trout and Beetle Garden good for the rooms that collect furniture over time: a kitchen, a family room, a child's bedroom. The black-ground ones, Midnight Bouquet and Stitched Peonies, are for dining rooms. Rolling Surf, breakers in burnt orange, amber and aubergine over linen, is drawn large and wants a wall you can see from a distance, a hallway or a stairwell.

Picking between the designs

Ask what holds the colours together. In Pressed Blooms it is the weathered grey planks showing through the middle. In Painted Trout it is the even rows of fish on cream. In Beetle Garden it is the antique study-plate drawing, peonies and poppies with ladybirds and grasshoppers crawling through them. In Jewel Terrazzo it is the midnight-navy ground under fuchsia, emerald and turquoise chips. Then decide whether you want the colour painted, as in the bouquets and Rolling Surf, or drawn, as in Woodland Songbird and Beetle Garden, where the colour sits inside fine ink lines and reads quieter from across the room. Chinoiserie Branch, a different flower in every colour on rose pink, is the most cheerful thing here.

Related

The painterly ones continue in watercolor wallpaper and abstract wallpaper; the colourful birds and beetles in animal wallpaper. For choosing a wallpaper the whole room can be built around, read What is statement wallpaper.