The dining room is a pretty multi-functional room in our home. This is where we eat, work or craft up some DIY projects. It’s basically where a lot of the action and magic happens. It is also a space where great conversations & discussions are held and, of course, memories are made. I think it’s essential to maximize the way you live and use your domicile. It’s healthy and makes you feel happy and more at home, as it offers to house and manifests all layers of your personality.
Feature walls can be very powerful. A surface you can use to accentuate and “embellish” a room. A great blank “canvas”, where you can express yourself and visually create a manifest of your style and simultaneously an extension of yourself. A great way to turn your place into a visual sanctuary, a place you can resort to and feel at home.
There are so many directions to take while planning a feature wall, such as placing a frame collage, a mural, wallpaper, oversized artwork or you can just simply write on the wall. The options are literally endless and that’s certainly the beauty of it.
I personally think it’s all about creating a visual moment. You are basically creating a life-sized vignette consisting of art pieces, furniture, and accessories. Important is that all pieces should complement each other and create visual interest, through a variety and preferably contrasting textures, shapes, and colors. Furthermore, you want to make sure the scale of each piece works in this collective.
Along the process, you will realize that trial and error will become your best friend. By adding and/or removing items you can analyze and work your way towards your final look and intuitively approach your internal vision of your feature wall.
And let me tell you, it is ok to first think that one item is the perfect fit, but then when actually trying it out, you realize that it doesn’t work at all. take it as a lesson, because that way you know, what certainly doesn’t work and know, what to avoid in the next piece.
SOURCES
Image 1 :: Seen on Interiorzine.com
Image 2 :: Seen on Trendenser.se
Image 3 :: Seen on Unknown
Image 4 :: Seen on Tredenser.de
Image 5 :: Seen on Homeadore.com
Image 6 :: Seen on Tamizo.com
Image 7 :: Seen on Sulia.com
Image 8 :: Seen on Thedesignchaser.com
Image 9 :: Seen on Thelifecreativeblog.com
Image 10 :: Seen on Popsugar.com
Image 11 :: Seen on DecorationArch.com
Image 12 :: Seen on Thedecorista.com
Image 13 :: Seen on Seen on Domainehome.com
Image 14 :: Seen on Myscandinavianhome.com
Let’s be honest, it’s really not that easy to source motifs for a gallery wall. Clients frequently ask me how to mix different medias and I often find myself sharing the same approach: The more diverse the collection the more dynamic and enriched the gallery wall becomes. The trick is to arrange and re-arrange the art pieces until it visually complements and makes sense. With that said: Lay them out and make sure neighboring pieces have at least one thing in common: Whether it is the color or pattern that these have in common, it really doesn’t matter.
As a student, I remember always being “hungry” for new inspirations and new design projects and always scouring design mags on any given occasion. I would commit to expensive design magazine subscriptions in order to stay current. Furthermore, in an attempt to bring organization to it, I tried creating a catalogue on my computer, so I would scan the images and store them and categorize them in order to be able to find them. I would also browse the internet like no other to find new images and I’d save them in specific categories. After a while, I would transfer them onto external hard drives to make room for new images. I admit, it was not the most ideal system and it definitely ate up a lot of my storage space on both my laptop and external drives and slowed them down extremely. It wasn’t the most practical approach either, since I wouldn’t have the backlink of the source. I also tried the whole bookmarking thing and I soon started disliking it, since it didn’t have the visual support I needed to make it easy to find what I was looking for. And then Pinterest came along and changed my life completely.
