Small bathrooms are a great place to experiment with wallpaper. Whether you call it a powder room or refer to it as ‘the downstairs loo’ or something else altogether, it’s an excellent place to inject some additional color and personality into your home. I love to suggest wallpaper as an alternative to paint for my Color Consultation clients. Here are my top 5 reasons why, and why you, too, should consider it for your home.
You can deviate from your usual style.
So many of us live in homes that have an open plan format of some kind or another, especially living areas. While this style has its benefits and is often preferred for family-friendly living, it does throw a few curveballs our way in terms of decorating. We have to work to make sure that the colors we choose for our rooms make sense together. This is a large part of my work, and I always like to talk about how the colors in all rooms in an open plan format need to be ‘friends’. But in these homes, any room with a door is a chance to deviate from that carefully planned color scheme and go a little rogue.
It’s good to push your ‘play’ button every now and again. Bonus: surprise and delight your guests!
It’s natural that we find ourselves defaulting to choosing the same colors over and over. My work with homeowners very much centers around around understanding their preferences for color and decorating styles. I encourage people to build a foundational palette that they can build their rooms around. But there is a danger of getting a little too comfortable with our personal palettes, and sometimes we forget how to break the rules that we make for ourselves. It’s good practice to push your ‘play’ button every now and again. Rules are made to be broken after all! :) Plus, it’s always fun to delight your guests with an unexpected surprise when they go to the loo! You can play with print, you can play with pattern or you can play with both if you like.
It’s budget friendly
It’s no secret that adding wallpaper to any room can take quite a toll on your budget. If you want a good quality paper that’s easy to work with, you’re going to need to spend a few pennies. Add in the overage that you’re required to order and the cost of installation (should you go that route), and you can find yourself looking at a daunting number.
A smaller room such a powder room with it’s just-a-sink-and-toilet set up is going to be much less square footage and therefore quite a lot easier on the wallet. And if you add tile or wainscoting to a portion of the walls, you decrease that amount even more.
Try your hand at some DIY wallpapering
Installing wallpaper can often be more expensive than the wallpaper itself, so if you’re looking to keep costs low, this is a great option. Due to the smaller nature of these rooms and the fact that there are usually fewer windows and doors to contend with, a small bathroom is a great place to try your hand at wallpaper installation. When choosing a wallpaper, look for something with a regular repeat to make your installation a little easier.
Small bathrooms usually don’t have too much going on
Small bathrooms usually just house a toilet and a sink and a mirror which means there’s not all that much going on in there to contend with a print or pattern. In other rooms there’s so much more going on (Sofas! Chairs! Rugs! Window treatments! Pillows!) that can cause you to need to pair back and tone down your wallpaper choices. Wallpapering a space with very little in it gives you so much more room to choose something dramatic, whimsical or unexpected. Winner!
5 places to look for fun and fantastic wallpaper:
I hope this has encouraged one or two of you to think about adding some wallpaper to a small bathroom in your home.
If you’d like help with making the decision of what do in your bathroom, or any other room in your house, i’m here to help! I offer a range of consultation services and Color Chats are a super way to get another pair of eyes or a second opinion on any project you’re attempting. As always, I’d love to hear from you.