How should we decorate these very tall walls?

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#Decor & Decorating#advice#painting#walls
What should Jessica do with these super tall walls?
The husband and I just bought a big house in semi-suburbs. It’s pretty bland right now (beige walls + beige tile floors = snooze) and while we’ve got plenty of ideas for making it the colorful, funky home that we want, I’m at a loss for what to do with the immense two story walls in the living room.

We’ll definitely paint them, but then what? I feel like they are calling out for something special. Anyone have any awesome decorating ideas for very tall walls? – Jessica


Homies, Jessica needs you to weigh in here: what should she do with these extremely tall walls? What have YOU done with your massively high walls?

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Comments on How should we decorate these very tall walls?

  3. My vote is find a piece of huge art (or make one/enlist an artistic friend) for the wall. Or a collage of similarly themed smaller paintings/wall sculptures.

    • What she said!

      This is the exact same floor plan as our new house (except we have beige carpet everywhere instead of tile), so we bought this monstrosity from Ikea for the left wall right inside the front door: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00176853/

      It’s about 6.5 feet long and 5 feet tall, so it’s good wall cover if you don’t feel like painting just yet. (We just moved in a few weeks ago, so painting this cathedral might not happen for a few months… it just seems so daunting!)

    • Quilts, tapestries and printed sarongs are big and can be used as decorative wall hangings.

      As an added bonus, they are soft and wont injure you if they fall on you, so you can safely hang them in places like over your bed (Why yes. I do live in earthquake country. Why do you ask?)

  5. My gym has super-tall walls. What they did was choose a nice color (they picked a sagey green) and painted it satin about 9 feet up and the rest in flat of the same color. It really brings the walls down and I hardly ever think about how tall it really is in there. They also chose some nice, big 8-foot paintings and framed mirrors that define the space.

  6. You know..I could see a great opportunity to do some hippy-funk deco by hanging fabrics or even a an assortment of scarves. I’ve always thought it’d be great to get old drapes and do the same. You never know!

  7. I say hang something you wouldn’t normally hang on a wall due to its size like a bicycle, or something like old windows with art or mirror behind the panes? Or do a gallery style wall with tons of pictures and art, or art out of art like some crazy photomosaic.

  8. One of my favorite tall ceiling/wall art pieces was in my cousins house. Someone made her a 1000 origami crane hanging mobile thing for her wedding and she hung it in her super vaulted entry way. Hers was a spiral but you could just as easily make one that hung more tapestry like. If you have that kind of time on your hands 🙂

    • We did this for our Handfasting too! We used strings of them hanging from the trees and columns as decorations. After everyone took a strand home as a favor we had a handful left. I strung them on a spring tension rod and centered them on a wall between picture groups of our handfasting. Something else I will do if I ever had the space is have my veil mounted. It’s a circular veil with a diameter of over 6 feet!

    • My mom caught a ginormous marlin (fish) on her honeymoon in the 1970’s. We’re talking 6.5′ at least. And it was mounted. In a flexed position.

      NOBODY has a place for a fish like that in a normal house! Hers eventually got damaged in a reno and trashed, but she always wanted to put it up. It would’ve been perfect in a similar space.

  12. if you want to dived the right wall in half you: from where the upper railing ends you could run a white piece of trim out from the bottom and then paint two different colors. 2, you could paint any picture you wanted and paint a fake railing in front of the secne on the right wall. 3. the entery way into the kitchen dining room could have a rounded feature added to make the opening an arch. there are a lot of rectangular shapes going on though so that might stick out or it might soften things up.

  13. Totally just a seasonal thing, but you can put very tall Christmas (or holiday-of-your-choice) trees in very tall spaces! What’s even better is that you can sometimes get very tall trees for much less than reasonably sized trees — usually, they’re only sold to malls, churches, and so-on, but friends of ours had a two-story living room, and they always put up a larger-than-average tree!

  15. I seem to recall that whenever confronted with a tall wall, Thom Filicia of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” would paint large blocks of alternating color onto the wall to visually break it up. There are a couple of episodes on YouTube where he does this.

    • This is my fave idea here. But, you should probably explain a gobo…

      For those who are not aware, a gobo is a cut-out that you put in front of a light. Often it’s a high intensity spotlight. When you turn the light on, the filter makes the light project in a shape with light/dark areas (so a tree outline, a window frame, company logo, snowflakes, etc. instead of a plain spotlight). They use them in theatre a lot.

      You could do fun things with a Peter Pan silhouette, the Bat signal, outline of Dracula, stars, snowflakes, a falling leaves or falling snow design, Santa’s sled with falling presents…

  18. I don’t have any epic ideas, just something I’ve learned from our 11 foot ceilings. Something that seems too big when it’s in your hands will not be too big when it’s on the walls. The kids’ school pictures are 8×10 in huge frames with wide mats, but they look like 5×7 pictures on our big tall wall.
    Definitely go BIG with your decor.
    Or, if you want the height to disappear, you could paint your wall color only 10 feet up (or so) and then have the rest of the walls the same color as the ceiling.
    Pictures once you’ve decorated please!

  21. My mother has these types of walls and her approach was to ignore the upper half. She painted the walls a warm color to keep the space from being too cold and hung things on the Lower half. You could do mirrors but get cheap builders mirrors and frame them up (they have products for that that are cheaper than buying huge expensive mirrors ) that just reflects the problem . I like the photo collage idea. I also saw Sonething in pinterest that has big empty frames layered on top of each other off center and spray painted different colors – super. Cool.

  22. MURAL!!!! Are you kidding me! I would LOVE to have walls this big to do a large flowing mural on one and that brick tile up the other and then hang ANYthing you want on it. Or Living garden wall? Water feature? soooo many options. Please post a follow-up photo.

    • I’ve done this before and instead of buying multiple shades of paint just buy the darkest and a lot of white. Paint the darkest area, mix in white, and paint the next area blending with the previous as you go. It looks AWESOME, btw. 🙂

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