How to Choose Wallpaper for a Living Room That Still Feels Right in Five Years
Practical guidance on pattern, scale, colour and finish, from people who sell wallpaper for a living.
The living room is the hardest room to get right. It has to work for morning coffee, telly nights, dinner parties and everything in between. Choosing wallpaper for a living room is really about choosing a mood you can live with day in, day out. Here's how to narrow it down.
Start with the room, not the paper
Before you look at a single sample, note two things: how much natural light the room gets, and which direction it faces. A north-facing living room needs warmer tones to stop it feeling flat. A bright south-facing room can take cooler greys, deep greens and richer patterns without going gloomy.
How to choose wallpaper for a living room: scale matters
Small patterns
Work in busy rooms with a lot of furniture. They read almost as texture from across the space.
Large patterns
Suit rooms with clean lines and less clutter. Give a big print room to breathe.
Textured plains
The safest all-rounder. An Anaglypta or paintable textured finish gives a wall depth without committing you to a colour or pattern that might date.
Feature wall or all four?
A feature wall behind the sofa or fireplace is a low-commitment way to introduce pattern. Papering all four walls creates a more grown-up, enveloping feel, especially with a mid-tone or richer colour.
Choose for how long you plan to keep it
Trends move faster than most people redecorate. Stick to patterns and colours you were drawn to before you started scrolling for inspiration, they'll still feel like you in five years. Neutral textured wallpapers age particularly well because you can repaint them without stripping.
Finish and durability
Living rooms take more knocks than people realise. Sofas rub, radiators throw heat, and kids happen. A washable or scrubbable finish is worth paying for. Vinyl and heavier textured papers cope better than lightweight prints.
The sample stage
Order at least three samples of anything you're seriously considering. Tape them up in different corners of the room. Look at them at breakfast, at dusk, and under lamps in the evening. Colours shift dramatically across the day, especially deeper shades.
Calculating how much you need
Wallpaper is sold by the roll, but roll coverage varies. Most standard rolls cover roughly five square metres, but pattern repeat cuts into usable coverage, sometimes by a lot. A large drop-match pattern can waste a full metre per length. Measure the wall height and width, add ten per cent for cuts and mistakes, then check the pattern repeat on the product page. Better to order one extra roll now than to find the batch has changed when you go back for more.
Working with what's already in the room
Existing furniture, flooring and curtains all cast colour onto your walls in ways that samples on a bare wall miss. A grey sofa will pull cool tones out of a warm neutral. Wood floors reflect amber and can make cool greys look muddy. If you can't move the furniture out for the sampling stage, at least hold samples up next to the biggest pieces to see how they read together.
The order in which you make decisions matters
The mistake we see most often is people choosing wallpaper first and then trying to make everything else work around it. Wallpaper is easier to choose once you know the sofa, the flooring and the main soft furnishings are staying put. If a whole redecoration is on the cards, pick the paper last, not first. It's the one element with the widest range of choice, so making it the flexible bit makes the rest of the scheme easier to build.
Ready to shortlist?
Order free samples of your top picks and see them in your own light.
Torn between options? Check out some inspiration here, or give the team a call, we help people through this decision every day.