It’s one of the planet’s biggest interior design myths. And it’s probably why, during the long years when interior design meant bland hotel-style interiors, fewer and fewer people were using wood inside their homes. Yes, wood is brown. But brown is beautiful! It’s subtle, and it lets you create a quiet, calm backdrop against which to add plenty of vivid colour and vibrant decorative pizzazz.<\/p>\n
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Most people think dark colours make a room look smaller. But that’s nonsense. As any interior design professional will tell you, using darker colours on your walls \u2013 and even the ceiling \u2013 actually makes a room look much bigger.<\/p>\n
This is great news for those of us who adore the look, colour and feel of real wood. It’s heartening for people who prefer richly coloured textures and personality-filled rooms over pale, light interiors. And it’s bang on trend as far as today’s recycling and re-purposing Zeitgeist is concerned.<\/p>\n
All of which probably explains why so many contemporary interior design styles are using wood to create texture as well as deliver an illusion of space. If, like most of us ordinary folk, you need to make the most of the small-ish amount of space you have, decorating with wooden accents is a great way to do it.<\/p>\n
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Most wooden floors feature the same pattern running through the entire floor. There’s the texture of the wood itself, i.e. the grain and the knots, plus the pattern the floorboards, wooden tiles or parquet pieces make when they’re laid \u2013 two lots of beautiful texture in one. But there’s another design advantage: because the same or a similar pattern runs through the entire floor, it creates a real feeling of continuity, which in turn helps open up the space.<\/p>\n
Engineered oak flooring might be your best bet, expensive but long lasting and particularly beautiful. Laminate flooring is cheaper, although you can buy top quality stuff with a 25 year guarantee. It comes in all sorts of stunning textures and a huge range of colours and textures, smooth and rough, from pale oak to deep, dramatic ebony black.<\/p>\n
Now that shabby chic, Shaker style, traditional French decoration and eccentric, eclectic mixes are back in fashion with a vengeance, you can take wood much farther.<\/p>\n
How about using rustic wooden elements in your home? You could even go as far as cladding your walls \u2013 or just a feature wall \u2013 with a combination of pale and dark woods, creating a stunning, warm, dramatic textured finish. Wood is also a good sound and heat insulator so you might even save a bit of cash on your energy bills while you’re at it.<\/p>\n
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What a relief! Instead of feeling we have to make every piece of furniture in the room match, mixing and matching is the name of the game for 2015. Which means you can have a splendid time combining furniture made from dark and light woods \u2013 and everything in between \u2013 with creative abandon.<\/p>\n
How about an old English oak chest from the 1800s, so dark it’s almost black, combined with a light oak French country sideboard and a modern hardwood coffee table in a gorgeous reddish wood, all wax-polished to a high sheen?<\/p>\n
Do you live near the coast? If so the beach could provide a thrilling resource in the guise of driftwood. The best bits are smoothed and shaped by the sea, salt-bleached to a lovely silvery grey. You can use smaller chunks of driftwood to create a frame around a mirror, for example. Just glue it direct onto the glass with No More Nails glue, or onto an ordinary wooden mirror frame.<\/p>\n
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Then there’s sculpture. A large piece of textured driftwood can stand in a corner of your room, simply leaning against the wall. You could ‘pot’ it in an attractive container filled with beach pebbles or garden centre-bought slate chunks. Or even hang it from the ceiling using a section of old rusty chain for an ultra-modern impact.<\/p>\n
Wood wall panelling is a big design hit right now because it reflects the Shaker trend so well. You can buy brand new wood panels for bathrooms, kitchens, lounges and dining rooms, more or less any room in your home. They come in all sorts of colours and textures, some traditional and some hyper-modern. You can even buy genuine antique wood panelling…at a price. Here are three\u00a0handy resources to inspire you:<\/p>\n
Wallpaper manufacturers have stepped into the breach, responding to the trend for funky wood textures.\u00a0 You could decorate an entire room with wood textured wallpaper panels or just one feature wall. These cool new wallpapers deliver an outdoorsy feel, mixing industrial style with country home d\u00e9cor and about as far from traditional floral wallpapers as it gets.<\/p>\n
Think muted colours and strong outdoor textures: rust, wood and even concrete. If you’re wary of going too far, grab some wallpaper samples and test-drive the look. Remember there’s much more to wallpaper than walls. You can use it on furniture, to line bookcases, decorate your staircase risers, as a funky border around a room, on the panels of your interior doors, on the ceiling, the bed head, or even the fireplace. The rule is this: there are no rules.<\/p>\n
Which wood texture wallpaper to choose? You could try the innovative designs of Suzanne Yates or Graham & Brown, whose gorgeously innovative papers bring the outdoors indoors with earthy textures and natural colours, both calming and elegant.<\/p>\n
You can also buy these, all absolutely stunning:<\/p>\n