Don’t Let Blank Walls Dominate Your Room*

Whether you have just moved into a new home or recently decided on a restyle and pulled everything out of your room (be it your living room, bedroom, or otherwise), you might find that a bare wall, when it’s big enough, can be terribly distracting. Not in a good way, like an effective focal point, it can look downright unfinished. Here, we’re going to look at how you can ensure that a blank wall doesn’t haunt your halls for too long, with a range of ways that you can dress it us and help it look extra stylish, personal, and welcoming.

Create a gallery wall

It’s perhaps the obvious answer, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less effective. Gallery walls are excellent ways to take up space with a relatively easy option. The first thing that you want to do is to select art that suits your space. You can create a contrast, a thematic collection, or choose pieces based on a specific colour palette that you want to establish, but there are plenty of sites that you can find with very wide selections of wall art. As such, your number one focus should be choosing pieces that suit your sense of style. Of course, how you arrange those pieces also matters, as you want them to take up enough space to help the wall look bare but you don’t want to have to rely on tons and tons of pieces to do it.

Make one big piece your focal point instead

You don’t need to do much mixing and matching if you’re only going to be relying on one piece. Large-scale art can see you doing a lot more with a lot less. The size of the painting or photography can make it immediately attention catching. Plus, it’s a lot easier to establish a tone, atmosphere or theme with a single image instead of trying to cobble one together from across multiple images. It’s also a great way to ensure that a room keeps a minimalist appeal without letting it look too empty. Some walls might simply be too big for this approach, but it can be effective in certain spots.

Get a little more personal with it

Wall art isn’t the only thing you can do to create a gallery. You can just as easily do it with your own photos. Whether it’s photos of you and your experiences, your loved ones, or places that you have been throughout the years, it’s a great way to make a home really feel like it’s yours. Creating a cohesive style through personal photography can be a little more difficult, so the best way to unify them or contrast them against the wall is with the right choice of frames as found on this website. Every photo can share a similar frame style to help them feel more cohesive when the subject matter itself is not as easily mixed together.

Take the DIY approach to wall art

Photos aren’t the only way to make wall art a little more personal, however. If you don’t want to hang art on the wall itself, you can turn the wall into your piece of art. Creating an accent wall with decorative painting techniques can be even more effective for maintaining the minimalist style you might have in the space while greatly changing the appeal of the wall itself. One example is marbling, which is well suited to opulent or luxurious feeling rooms. Another, the strié style, is a little more subtle but helps add a sense of texture and contrast to the wall. If you thinking of repainting the wall, then consider painting styles that are a little more creative.

Bring some texture and depth to the wall

Simply adding things onto the wall is perhaps the most common approach to take, but it’s far from the only one. You can just easily change the entire feeling and look of the wall itself. Cladding, for instance, can be massively effective. There are different types of cladding, such as those designed to look like brickwork, those that look like natural wood, and various other materials. It not only helps make the wall distinct from all of the others, but it brings a feeling of dimension to it with its 3D textures. It doesn’t just look like the thing it’s simulating, it feels like it to the touch, too.

Drape your favourite fabrics from it

It’s a style that is not quite as popular as it used to be, but it can still be very effective to instead choose some form of blanket, quilt, or tapestry to hang from a wall. Choosing your favourite tapestry, or buying them from places like this site can help you bring additional texture, much like cladding, but focuses more on softness and creating a naturally warm vibe. If you have a bed or seat against the wall, it can create a much more welcoming and comfortable atmosphere. Plus, the visual impact can be every as diverse as hanging up a large piece of art, given that you can choose any pattern that suits your fancy.

Go for the practical approach

A lot of people don’t like a room that feels too decorative. They would rather that everything be in a place that feels practical and useful. You can just as easily do that by making use of vertical storage space ideas. Even places like the living room can have practical storage applications for the wall, such as magazine holders for a collection, shelves for your books, and so on. It still has the same impact of creating a wall that has a little more personality and style but also makes you look more organized and practically minded. Of course, other rooms make better use of different types of vertical storage so you very much want to choose them based on the space.

Float some shelves

Not all storage has to be super practical, either. If you have knick-knacks that you want to display, houseplants, or you want a place to create a vignette, the walls can work just as well for that. Hanging up some shelves is not all that difficult, as you can see here. It’s also an excellent way to make use of slightly more awkward wall spaces, such as above furniture or other architectural features since you can be very specific with how much vertical space that you use. If you want to hang some shelves but you’re not entirely sure what you want to put on them, then turning them into bookshelves is an easy way to turn them into a space that feels visually and culturally enriching.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

It’s another fairly common and easy answer, but there are lots of benefits to helping a wall shine with the help of some reflective mirrors or even other reflective materials. Perhaps the most obvious of them is that they help the room look larger by toying with how we see dimensions in space. However, if you place them across from where you get the most natural light in the room, their reflective qualities can also help them make the room much brighter, getting rid of dark corners and make the space feel much more welcoming. You just want to be careful that you’re not going for mirrors that are too large, as they look a little stark and even voyeuristic if they’re not placed with intention.

A wall is a big vertical space with no shortage of options on how you can dress it up. Hopefully, the examples above give you some ideas to get started with.