Neutral Wallpaper

Forty-one neutral wallpapers in greige, taupe, oatmeal and kraft: sepia citrus branches, conifers sketched in taupe and charcoal, speckled seed pods on greige, white roses on a linen-textured ground, india-ink plums on warm kraft. Colour turned down to the point where the drawing does the talking.

Choosing neutral wallpaper

Where it works

Neutrals are for the rooms that need to stay calm while everything else changes: a rented flat, a home office, a landing, a bedroom you want to read as restful. Trailing Rose and Taupe Blossom, white blossom on greige, are the softest and go behind a bed. Sketched Pines, conifers in a loose row on off-white, suits a hallway or a child's room without being childish. Orange Grove, sepia citrus on cream, is fine in a kitchen. The two darker ones, Inked Plums on kraft and Indigo Cardinal on flax linen, hold a dining room without any colour at all.

Picking between the designs

Decide whether you want the neutral warm or cool. Warm: Orange Grove, Golden Branch with its yellow apples, Speckled Pods, Taupe Blossom, Inked Plums on warm kraft. Cool: Sketched Blossom on pale warm grey, Trailing Roses on a faintly damasked grey, Graphite Magnolia. Then how much drawing you want on the wall: Orange Grove and Golden Branch are fine pen line and mostly ground; Speckled Pods and Trailing Rose are fuller; Inked Plums is bold brush. Indigo Cardinal reads as an old textile, a block-printed bird in indigo and antique gold, for a room with wood and linen.

Related

The palest of these overlap with cream wallpaper and white wallpaper; the greyer ones with grey wallpaper. For a textured neutral instead of a drawn one, read What is grasscloth wallpaper.