Dear Fiona: are feature walls really so awful?

Dear Fiona,

I know – I know – that everybody hates feature walls; but are they really so awful?  Is there a way that they can be done well?  Might they come back in fashion, the way that everything inevitably does? I ask because I’ve fallen in love with some really expensive wallpaper (and I mean, really expensive) – and I can therefore only possibly afford to wallpaper one wall (or justify wallpapering one wall) and even that’s going to take some saving up.  Please tell me that there’s a way to make it work!  Because I really do love it so much and I think living with it is going to make me really happy.

Love

Vintage Champagne Taste on a Prosecco Budget

Dear Prosecco Budget,

Thank you for your letter – at the heart of which is an issue with which I reckon every reader will be able to identify.  We’ve all longed for things we can’t afford – or can’t justify spending money on.  For me, that’s rather a lot of art, as well as, like you, a wallpaper.  I wanted to use it in my bedroom, and haven’t, because the estimated bill was approaching five figures, and I’ve got tween children who are into ponies and a sub-optimal pension balance. However, unlike you, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to try to make it work by only papering one wall – which is mainly because I’m not particularly keen on that look.

I’m not alone; feature walls – aka ‘accent walls’ – have consistently topped every single ‘most hated interior design feature’ survey conducted in the last decade, and while some interior designers are diplomatic in their dislike, “I think they’re typically best avoided” says Tiffany Duggan of Studio Duggan, others are straight up about their feelings. “Eurgh,” says Tamsin Saunders of Home & Found, shuddering at the idea of “turquoise metallic wallpaper or exposed brick work walls” that were symptomatic of the 1990s and early 2000s Changing Rooms era.  Then, promoted as a simple means of adding a risk-free and low-maintenance area of interest, they spread, rash-like, through homes up and down the country, and “they were the last word in naff,” describes Bridie Hall. They even appeared on Sex and the City, remember Big’s attempt at a fire engine-red feature wall? Season 3, episode 18, I believe.

But it wasn’t the first time they were tried, and what is notable is that even in the hands of someone who is unequivocally brilliant, they’re a challenge.  When he was a teenager, the great Nicky Haslam’s mother allowed him to decorate a downstairs sitting room in the house on Cumberland Terrace that they were then living in.  “I’m ashamed to say I elected to paper one wall only with a strident modern design,” he recounts in his biography, Redeeming Features.  “My brother Michael was so distressed by the scheme that he could hardly be induced to come across from his own flat at the back of the house.” In other words, there is ample evidence that feature walls are a truly terrible idea, which is almost undoubtedly why they haven’t – yet – come back into fashion. As to whether they ever will?  Well, that’s up for debate, but what I can say is that yours is not the only letter that I’ve received on the subject.

One of the reasons so many people wonder about them – and the possibility of their revival – is that if only they could work, they would, as you’ve identified, be a convenient equivalent of getting a couple of cushions made up in a fabric that it too eye-watering to be used for curtains.  It would also be a handy means of using a paper or colour that you worry might be too much if you do a whole room in it.