It’s that time a year that I start to get a little stir crazy at home and have this major urge to redecorate. The newest home decor trend that caught my eye: fabric walls instead of wallpaper.
Okay, so it kind of hit the internets about six or seven years ago, but it’s back with a vengeance and I really like it.
It’s such an interesting idea considering what a pain wallpapering can be — let alone how expensive it is! — so I’ve looked around the web to find some cool, creative ways to hang fabric as wallpaper in all different ways, and a few different methods to help you DIY.
If you’re wondering why anyone would do this, Ashley Poskini at Apartment Therapy calls it a “great solution for commitmentphobes” and points out that if you’re a renter, you can take the fabric down and bring it with you when you move. She also offers a great tutorial on how to hang fabric as wallpaper using liquid starch. I love how pretty this floral looks along one wall, to brighten up a kitchenette that was converted to a walk-in closet.
At the Numbered Street Designs blog, she offers a whole lot of clever ideas, but I really sparked to using graphic fabric as wallpaper behind a bed. Especially if you tend to have solid, simple linens and sheets like I do, it’s a cool way to add some interest to the room, and the black and white is so sharp!
PS if you check out the photo just below this on her post, you can see how she also used fabric to cover the small wall exposed behind the TV in a bookcase. Really smart!
Speaking of shelving, I totally fell in love with this photo at the T.A. Lorton online shop, which shows how fabulous it looks to have a patterned wall behind an open Chinoiserie bookcase that they’re selling completely. That makes me want both the bookcase — and some fabric in that pattern.
Similarly, if you have a closed bookcase you could absolutely use fabric behind each shelf to make an older case feel new and fresh.
Leave it to Young House Love to not only post a beautiful reno, but share some really helpful tips for covering your walls with fabric. I love this fabric-covered wall in their children’s closet, which sounds like Uber-Pinteresting, until you realize her daughteralso uses the closet as a play nook. Interestingly, she takes a totally different tack from most of the other DIY-ers, with a tutorial that skips the liquid starch and instead uses a staple gun, fabric glue, and some ribbon around the edges for trim.
If you don’t want to do hang an entire wall with fabric, Beth shares how she hung fabric instead of wallpaper to punch up a mud room on her site, Avenue Laurel. She uses it sparingly, just on the small patches of wall up top above the wainscoting and the effect is pretty sweet.
It’s an incredibly helpful post, since she answers lots of questions from her readers that you might be wondering as well — like whether it smells, whether it gets dirty, how well its held up, and more. If you’re considering redoing your own space with some fabric walls, you might want to check this post to reassure yourself that it’s not an insane undertaking.
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