Revealed: We roll out the top six wallpaper trends for 2024

Here are the iconic looks from the world's leading design houses

Graham & Brown New Eden, from €105 per roll (paper) or 35sq m for murals, grahambrown.com/ie.

GARDEN OF PARADISE

Unashamedly grand, Graham & Brown has launched both its colour of the year for 2024 (Viridis — a soft sage green) and its wallpaper collection for 2024 — New Eden. Biophilics are a vital decorating story, and in feature walls, we simply cannot get enough of country gardens, succulent fruits, birds, bees and everything from both the feral and horticultural world. 

The firm is celebrating its Decade of Design and its team has focused on “a Utopian space led by a design that encourages welcoming and acceptance to all those who enter the home, blurring boundaries with rooms that can be both inside and outside to create a beautiful backdrop for entertaining, inspired by the Japanese art of omotenashi". 

In short, it celebrates the comfort and rejuvenation of the environment, but in a beautiful, opulent curated way seen in 18th-century handpainted walls. Its New Eden wallpapers are taken from a highly detailed painting with a complex, rich palette, writhing in flora and fauna, and deliberate “shots” of colour. Explore New Eden murals, papers, curtains and accessorising. From €105 per roll (paper) or €35 per square metre for murals, grahambrown.com/ie.

Shibui Copper by Mind the Gap. Also available in earthly tones and asphalt greys shades; €229.

METALLIC MAGIC

Shibui design is something we’re seeing a lot in new season wallpaper patterns. It includes traditional Japanese cherry blossom boughs, exquisitely detailed painterly papers and unique abstracts. 

The concept has to do with simplicity and subtlety and celebrating the inner life of ordinary things (it’s more than a bit arty). The Romanian brand Mind the Gap has taken this to a fascinating level in distressed 1970s-inspired copper wallpaper. 

It could be added to a period or modern space and features oxidised red metal and scorched black shades. 

Priced at €4.65 per square metre in 10m lengths with a complete mural in three rolls, it’s a paste-the-wall product, easy to handle if this is your first DIY wallpapering adventure. Shibui might celebrate the perfect in the imperfect, but your wallpapering project must be spot on; €229, mindtheg.com.

Prete-Moi Ta Plume (lend me your pen/quill/feathers), €291.

ON THE CATWALK

For the fashionista, well, it has to be LaCroix, darling, to mark a confident return to decadent luxury as maximalist interiors stride confidently into view for 2024. 

Haute couture brands continue to add fabrics and various interior elements to their collections. 

Prete-Moi Ta Plume (lend me your pen/quill/feather) is a French supermodel from the L’Odyssee folio of Christian LaCroix Maison. 

Take this modern icon over walls, and kitchen cabinetry, and even trim its wings to panelling if you find it just too high fashion to fly all over the room. 

Digitally printed onto a smooth non-woven ground as a complete panel 1.35m wide x 3m high, each roll incorporating three 45cm wide matching drops to be hung in sequence. 

Prete-Moi Ta Plume also comes in soft, pure cotton — perfect for a wide range of interior applications from upholstery to curtains (machine washable at 30C). Wallpaper from €291. Delivered in a roll containing three strips for one panel — assemble multiples for larger walls. Suppliers include wallpaperdirect.com.

Spacefrog Bond II for Wallsauce, from €49 sq m.

CHILD'S PLAY

Wall stories offer us the chance to be highly expressive, and taking the scale beyond the expected is perfect for adding wonder and interest to babies' and children’s rooms in particular. Environmental themes are on the ascent. 

Husband-and-wife design team Vernon and Katherine (curiously shy about their surnames) are the creative duo behind SpaceFrog Designs. Katherine has a special interest in the natural world and is famed for her octopus, koi and melting mountain ranges. Their landscape and marine murals use broad strokes and a simple palette of three or four colours. 

Closer to oriental woodblock prints than typical European papers, the imagery is not heaving in busy inclusions that force your eyes to jump left and right. We love their Bond II image of two whales, which can dive behind a sofa or bed and is truly lovely with its inky blue ground, pebble grey, and shale with a band of gold. When ordering from any digital paper provider, you can position a “crop box” to select the area of the image you want, then click select your mural size to suit the available wall; from €49 per square metre, wallsauce.com/eu.

Coronation Craze in Slate, €71.25 per roll.

ART DECO

The swerve, the curve, the whiplash feminine line is softening and is set to soften out the corners of our homes in the coming year. 

The roots of this revival go right back to art deco, known for its stiff geometry, but which also celebrated sexy, rounded, pneumatic shapes and free-flowing silhouettes in everything from bronze statues of long, lean flapper dancers, to cloud-back armchairs. 

The tension of straight lines and curvilinear forms make a room interesting, and wallpapers are an ideal place to flex your flux. 

Choose an abstract paper with a bold, large repeat or set of startling 1930s-informed architectural shapes, set on white or grey ground to keep it fresh and modern. My choices would include Carnaby by Feathr of Finland, with its vintage-style mural of jazz age grey, orange and pale blue forms on a white ground; €53 a roll, various suppliers. 

Second up, and another shoutout for the affordable, highly creative imaging at Graham & Brown, is its Coronation Craze, a terrace of large balloons and pert supporting circles in a similar colourway to Carnaby in a witty young repeat. Relaunched from its very popular “Through the Decades” collection, the Slate colourway features pops of teal, navy and yellow on a grey backdrop; €71.25 per roll.

Maximalism and a Midas-touch returns for 2024. Crowned Crane Fonda, bathroom by Drummonds, samples €3.95.

GOLDEN MOMENTS

Comfort and luxury embellishments are pushing their way past empty, indifferent spaces with their sparse furnishings and limp colourways. Adding metallic shine is one way to inject opulent interest for 2024 without cluttering up the room with dust-catchers and indifferent ornaments. Include a Midas touch with long-legged Crowned Crane Fonda, set amongst lush palm trees, a top-selling textured, traditional botanic by Divine Savages of the UK, reimagined in larger-scale metallic Soft Copper and Gold colourways. These are gorgeous papers made with traditional rollers and hand-mixed paints that can be combined in an interesting mirror effect over and under a dado height. 

For something retro’, busy and undeniably pink (plaster shades are trending as Dulux vouches for a candy-almond tone — Sweet Embrace for 2024) — take a look at the Savages’ Bye-Bye Birdie in Petticoat Pink - a soft pink base with “alluring accents of cream”. Who could resist mischievous felines stalking unsuspecting budgies scattered up the walls for a New Year eye-catcher? Samples in simple-to-hang, paste-the-wall papers from €3.95, divinesavages.com.