The most popular wall design in the living room includes wallpaper, eye-catching wall colors, and wall tattoos. But other ways exist to set accents on the living room wall and make the room cozy. You can find the right ideas for every taste here.
Wall Design in the Living Room: The Wall Color Forms the Basis
Absolute color trends for 2023 are all earth and natural tones, from beige, sand, and brown to green, ocher, orange, and yellow, all shades of blue, and the eye-catching colors purple and magenta. They are all suitable for wall design in the living room. Because: Allowed is in the living room, what you like and courage to the color is rewarded.
However, even when designing walls with strong colors, remember that one maximum of three walls next to or opposite the windows is enough to set cozy accents. The remaining walls should be color-technically bright but more neutrally designed, and the designed wall colors are ideally taken up in wall decorations or accessories in the room.
Do you want to combine several wall colors on one living room wall? Purple and magenta, for example, go great together. Pink, gray, and blue also complement each other harmoniously. Or they design the wall in the living room with combined colors that also occur in nature: Green, yellow, and orange, for example. Or blue, white, and yellow. Brown, green and blue is also an unbeatable trio in all shades.
Wall design in the living room: accent wall thanks to the wallpaper.
An almost infinite number of colors, patterns, and decors makes the wallpaper a popular wall design in the living room because there is a suitable variant for every taste and every need – and this begins with the material from which the wallpaper is made: Paper, vinyl, felt, metal, non-woven, leather or velvet, each of them sets its accents and creates a different mood in the room. You can apply a washable wallpaper if you have pets or small children.
Pattern wallpapers are fully in the wall decoration trend, and no two are alike. Be the monochrome with tactile effects, floral design for the British country house feeling, large-scale and graphic patterns, geometric figures, green plants and leaves for the jungle look, fantasies of glitter, or even a personalized photo wallpaper.
When using patterned wallpaper in the living room, it is essential to always design only one wall or even a part of it with the wallpaper – this will give you the desired eye-catching effect, and the room will not look cluttered. Living rooms, in which all four walls have been designed with pattern wallpaper, usually look smaller and squatter than they are. In addition, such a room can also quickly become a sensory overload.
Speaking of overloaded senses: if it is now and then too loud in your living room and you would like to get the noise under control, felt wallpaper could provide mitigation. Because felt wallpaper is not only visually a special, very natural wall design but also dampens, almost incidentally, the noise level in the room.
When wallpapering the wall in the living room, you should proceed carefully and think beforehand about where to put which strip of wallpaper to get the desired pattern or photo. The manufacturing company often sends detailed instructions, which you should follow. If you want to apply a non-woven wallpaper, first check the substrate for its absorbency and, if necessary, pre-treat it.
Wall design in the living room: stone on stone
Stone look as a wall design element in the living room is well received by many people because it looks, depending on the type and size of the stones themselves, rustic or modern, but in any case, close to nature.
Stone walls combine with the interior styles’ industrial style and rustic alpine hut flair. Natural stone walls can be found as an integral part of the architecture in an industrial loft and in a mountain hut. In most other living rooms, stone-look walls need to be retrofitted.
A stone-look wall design can also perform quite practical functions, visually separating or framing one part of the room from another. The stone look must be kept rather light. So either whitewashed or just rather light gray stones are used for it.
However, you can create a stone look on the living room wall with real stones and use patterned wallpaper or a wall panel designed accordingly.
Wall design in the living room: it can also be cozy with concrete
A cozy wall design and concrete are mutually exclusive for many people. Concrete can provide high creative performance on the living room wall if combined correctly. Light wood, rattan, and bright trendy colors are the best way to do this.
When designing walls with concrete, you need to decide between two options: Do you want to leave the architectural concrete visible and make it durable, or do you want to put concrete in a different form on the wall in the living room? For example, with exposed concrete, a panel of concrete, or perhaps wallpaper with a concrete wall look?
A living room with a concrete wall tends to follow a modern and industrial interior style rather than a country style. A concrete wall, whether real or designed using wallpaper, can either be left rough and gray and exude its cool sobriety or softened with metallic accents, pictures, or even bunches of dried flowers and straw objects.
Wall design in the living room: wall panels provide comfort
Wall panels are panels that are attached to the walls. These panels can be made of glass, plastic, metal, or wood and also do not necessarily have to form a continuous unit but can have gaps between the individual elements. That is why wall panels are suitable for upcycling projects, such as wooden slats, laminate pieces, chipboard, or old solid wood cabinet doors.
If you choose a continuous wall panel on the living room wall, you can, for example, mount the TV on it and visually separate the TV area from the rest of the living room. As a room divider, the TV can also be placed on a pivoting panel, the back of which is designed with a pattern wallpaper or painting.
If you want to use the wall panel as a rustic element, you can also create an entire living room wall and attach pictures, flowers, or other decorations to the wooden slats. In this case, make sure that the living room’s decor comes across as light and bright. Otherwise, a wooden panel will look very oppressive to the room.
Tip:
Wall panels can be covered with wallpaper or stones, making them even more suitable for your taste.
Wall design in the living room: modern wall tattoos replace patterned wallpaper
Wall tattoos with quotes of famous people or wise calendar sayings are only a small part of the possibilities this type of wall design offers in the living room. Modern wall tattoos have evolved not only in terms of adhesive backing but also in terms of design. Whether it’s individual flowers, branches, geometric patterns, advertising columns, famous buildings, or even something you’ve designed yourself, wall tattoos have become more individual, stylish, and easier to remove. To create an accent wall in the living room with them, you need either one large or many smaller wall tattoos.
Tip:
A colorful wall tattoo loosens up a white wall and creates a good mood in the room. It can also be enlarged at any time and removed and exchanged for something you like better.
The advantage of this type of wall design is obvious: you can change a wall tattoo without difficulty, adapt to the seasons or your taste, and even enlarge it more and more. With a picture frame attached above it without glass and without a back wall, you can also put the wall tattoo again differently in a scene or incorporate it into a picture wall. This wall design is, therefore, particularly suitable for people who are quickly bored in their own four living room walls.
Wall design in the living room: set accents with lighting
Make the living room wall shine with lamps, lights, or hangable candle holders; this creates a cozy atmosphere and has an efficient use. Especially in small living rooms, you can save floor space and illuminate every corner.
But even in large living rooms, a wall lamp as part of the wall design provides light and accents in the right place, for example, at the reading place. When choosing lighting for the living room, make sure that the lamps match the rest of the interior in style and color but still bring an eye-catching effect. Thus, you already create a successful accent wall with a little color and a lamp.
Wall design in the living room: murals and picture frames are golden oldies
If you don’t like brightly painted walls in your living room or want to make interchangeable statements on your accent wall in the living area, you can fall back on the classics of murals and picture frames. One option for quick wall design in the living room is picture ledges, on which the works are arranged standing up. Another way to fix several works of art together is gallery strips on which the pictures hang. The advantage of both systems is that you can quickly change the displayed treasures and adjust them to the seasons or your mood.
However, pictures, posters, prints, or other works of art can also be used for wall design in the living room without additional molding and even without drilling holes in the wall. In this case, however, the frames of the individual works should match each other in color, as well as in the room, and the form in which they will be hung, should have been previously placed on the floor for testing.
Possible ways of hanging pictures are Petersburg hanging, grid hanging, edge hanging, row hanging, block hanging, and the so-called inside-the-lines hanging.
A classic wall design in the living room, which fits into any era, is that of the large mural above the sofa or the stove. In this case, a picture, whose picture frame is also very eye-catching, hangs centrally above the sofa or stove and shows what is important to you. Also possible is a collage or a series consisting of two or more matching works.
Alternatively, a section of an eye-catching pattern wallpaper can be showcased using a picture frame attached to the wallpaper without backing or glass, for example, using mounting tape. A DIY alternative for those who prefer to avoid swinging the brush themselves and do not want to hang photos are trendy moss pictures that bring a piece of nature into the living room. The purist version of this wall design in the living room is picture frames without paintings or photos attached to the wall, seemingly randomly and slightly overlapping.
Wall design in the living room: the wall plate is back
He is back: the wall plate or also called the collection plate. Even with our grandmothers, the porcelain adorned the walls in the hallway or kitchen. Mostly animals, forest scenes, cityscapes, or even simple still lifes were depicted on it. Who can hang a family heirloom in their living room? There are now also wall plates in the 21st-century version. Creative minds can also make their wall plate, for example, with cold porcelain.
The most important rule in this type of wall design in the living room: the wall color behind the wall plate must be bright and match the porcelain. So, for example, if you want to hang the classic white-blue wall plates with city views from various European metropolises, be sure to paint the wall behind them blue. Forest scenes will look best on a green or golden-brown wall.
Tip:
You don’t have to paint the entire wall this color. Wide stripes can further break up the look of the living room. However, hang the wall plates one below the other and slightly offset them on the wall to take advantage of the length of the strip.
Another wall decor classic is just climbing back into the top ten: the tapestry. The modern, even homemade carpets to hang are much too good for the floor but have earned a place between pictures, wall plates, and the family photos on the living room wall and fit, depending on the shape, decor, and color to all interior styles from Hygge to Moroccan to Boho.
