The One Thing To Avoid When Choosing A Border For Your Wallpaper

Wallpaper is having a renaissance in the design world with stylish new options for decorating your space. Home stores are awash in beautiful designs, from intricately embossed traditional wallpaper to easy peel-and-stick varieties that are perfect for renters and frequent renovators. The edges of where your wallpaper meets other surfaces, like adjacent walls, the ceiling, or lower wainscoting, have often been the places to add a wallpaper border for a more finished look. Many of today's designers, however, are recommending you skip busier and more ornate wallpaper borders to avoid a dated look.

With many ways to use wallpaper in a room, avoiding busy patterned borders may leave you wondering how to get a finished look without treading too far into the unfashionable past. While conventional attitudes promote the importance of bringing the eye up, sometimes a weighty or busy border can do the opposite, presenting a clunky horizontal line that actually makes the room feel smaller (which is why it's sometimes recommended to bring a vast ceiling down to a more human-scale). There are a number of fun options to implement instead, including molding, picture railing, paneling, as well as other techniques that can fulfill the same decorative function. All give the same visual separation and definition between the wallpaper and what surrounds it.

A great way to add interest and achieve a is to use wood trim or molding. If you plan to wallpaper most of the wall, consider topping it with some decorative crown molding in wood or vinyl. The crown molding serves as an architectural detail that gently curves and softens where the ceiling and wall come together, giving the former an illusion of greater height. Since the molding is painted or stained wood, it does not add to the business of a pattern but can bring additional texture and carved details to the room.

For a more paneled look, run sheets of bead board or shiplap ⅔ or ¾ the way up the wall and apply the wallpaper above. Or try applying wallpaper to the lower span of the wall under some pretty picture rail molding. This is a great way to paper walls in very high-ceilinged rooms without having to go all the way up the wall. You can also add a contrasting picture rail with paper that continues to the ceiling, essentially creating the look of a border without actually adding one. Or, make the perfect accent wall using segments of paper blocked off by slender strips of wall molding. This approach can be a great way to bring in patterns without having to cover a whole wall in paper.