A large loft apartment with exposed beams, ducts and brick is decorated with midcentury modern (MCM) dining furniture, a Persian carpet, and a dark leather sofa, mixing industrial and MCM styles
Design 101

Decorating with Texture

by Laura Grey No Comments

Texture is one of the elements of design that does the most to make a room feel welcoming and comfortable. We notice and remember colors and patterns, but textures really make a room feel interesting. They invite us to let our eyes and hands explore a space. Decorating with texture and three-dimensionality can bring warmth, personality, and (if some of the textures are soft and squishable) real coziness to your home.

Lack of Texture Makes a Room Look Cold

A minimalist, modern, sterile-looking white and grey bathroom. The floor and one wall are covered in grey ceramic wood-grained tiles. An oval freestanding tub is in the lower right corner next to a silver vertical towel rack and a white door with horizontal panels. Floating white cabinets are mounted on the tiled wall and are topped with grey stone and wide, low oval vessel sinks with industrial style tall silver fixtures below a low, wide mirror framed in silver. There is no color in this room, noting soft but white towels, nothing personal.
Crisp and elegant, but also clinical and cold, this ultra-smooth bathroom could use some color, print, and texture to make it feel more personal, friendly, relaxing, or fun | Jean van der Meulen for Pexels

Perfectly smooth elements like lacquered furniture, marble floors, and glass walls can be elegant and impressive, but they tend to make a room feel cold. Even a room with bold, rich colors can feel institutional and impersonal without textural elements.

Soft pieces like woven fabrics, knitted textiles, embroidered fabrics, macrame, and plants are especially soothing. In a bathroom, adding color or pattern via tiles, towels, plants, rugs, cabinetry, light fixtures, or art can help. These can keep it from feeling too much like a hospital, and more like a spa. Harder textural materials like carved wood, sculptural metal, paneling, or elements made of rustic wood or iron aren’t as welcoming, but they create a lot of visual variety and interest.

Urban? Rural? Textural Design Goes Both Ways

A child's nursery all done up in wam neutrals—a pale wooden pull toy on a pale floor against a pale wood crib over which is draped a tan, beige, and brown woven wool blanket. A white bookcase with wicker drawers is at right.
Though neutral and minimalist, the mixture of tones, materials, and textures make this Scandi-style nursery feel friendly | Tatiana Syrikova for Pexels

When we think of decorating with texture, many people think of styles like French country or modern farmhouse. Vintage signs, rough barn doors, and repurposed pieces show some wear give a rough-around-the-edges feel to a space.

Boho-style wicker beds, velvet pillows, and vintage patchwork sari bedspreads give a happy hippie vibe. Bohemian interior design lets you mix patterns, colors, textures, and objects from all over the world with wild abandon to get the lush look you want.

For a more minimalist style, consider pale Scandinavian style’s emphasis on wood. If you want something darker and more intense, modern industrial style and its reclaimed wood and metal materials may provide the bolder, harder textures you crave.

Texture Is Beauty You Can Feel

Texture is the most sensuous element of design. A room rich in textural elements begs to be touched, relaxed in, and cuddled up to. The rough or smooth textures of ceramics, sculptures, faux fur rugs, and deep plush easy chairs make us want to run our fingers over them or rest our whole bodies on them. Decorating with texture helps you feel a room’s beauty instead of just seeing it.

If you want a truly comfortable room, look around it and consider where your eye lands. How many things in the room look fun to touch? If your room looks full of hard, rough, spiky, or angular elements, it may radiate power or style. But is it inviting? When you design with texture, ask yourself whether you’ve added enough comfortable nooks or landing spaces.

A little goes a long way

Similarly, too much texture can make a room feel extra busy or overwhelming. Like too much pattern or many bold colors in one space, texture can go overboard. Leaving some open visual space where your gaze can rest provides balance.

It’s okay to have some areas with less visual buzz. In a room with lots of textures, you might choose soft colors or simple prints in upholstery, paint, or wallpaper. This way, elements won’t fight for attention. Bold wood grain can add a lot of texture to a room, too. Do you have a room with a lot of brick, stone, or busy marble? Consider using wood furnishings with a less noticeable grain to balance it out.

Modern Industrial Style Is Rich with Texture

A riveted metal stairwell in a former industrial building stands before a tall wall topped by many windows. Overhead are crisscrossed metal beams.
Modern industrial interiors feature functional shapes and industrial materials, unadorned designs, and bold lines | Kagan Yaldizkaya for Unsplash

Urban chic mixes sophisticated smoothness with rougher textures. These may include wood or metal beams and banisters, brick walls, poured concrete floors, and exposed ductwork. Furniture can include wrought iron and reclaimed wood tables. Leather seating and repurposed industrial-looking items are popular industrial elements, too.

Adding soft textures to an industrial-style home makes it feel more personal. Plants and textiles make it feel less like an office building lobby. Curtains, wall hangings, and rugs add comfort and dampen sound.

A heavily textured modern industrial space is visually interesting. It may not be as relaxed and friendly as a more country-influenced style. A space becomes more welcoming when you mix industrial elements with softer pieces. Upholstery, rounded tables and chairs, and curvy lamps soften things. Plants also make a room feel livelier.

Textures Can (& Do) Go Out of Style

Decorating with texture and lots of three-dimensional elements can make a room feel fresh and contemporary. However, textures are often among the first things to go out of fashion.

Highly textured fabrics and rugs (such as shag rugs or sculptured carpeting) were popular in the sixties and seventies. They felt dated and past their prime after about a decade. Pillows that no longer feel current are no big deal. You can easily swap in new ones. But what if you cover a whole floor with textured vinyl flooring, or a whole wall with shiplap or brick? It takes a lot of work and money to update them.

An L-shaped dining and living area is painted white and has pale wood floors and pale beige textured area rugs under the living area at front and the dining area behind. Two black metal oversized chandeliers, one round and one more rectangular, hang over the space. A round pale wood coffee table topped with a textural white planter and vibrant green plant are flanked with woven caramel leather chairs at front. Behind is a white shiplap-covered pair of walls around a dark wood dining table with six black wood side chairs and two white upholstered armchairs.
A single very rustic looking barn door of reused pale wood planks crossed diagonaly by another plant is suspended from black rail and rests on black metal wheels in a very industrial looking home. The floors are poured grey concrete; the walls appear to be concrete as well. There are two plans on the floor, but otherwise the only things in the room are three bare-bulb pendant lights, a black and grey artwork in an industrial style framed and hanging next to the barn door, a small table with some books, and more books and rocks on the floor in the room beyond the door. There is a multipaned industrial-looking window at the back of the room seen through the door.
A pale grey marble floor is topped with a dark grey rug. Above that is a low vivid orange sofa made of a series of velvet upholstered square cushions. Dark grey large square pillows top the orange sofa. Dark grey curtains flank white sheers over a window with an urban view. Thin vertical wood slats alternate with dark grey vertical stripe on a feature wall topped with a hanging black TV. Across that wall is a low black horizontal cabinet suspended from the wood slats and the white wall to the left of the TV area. A shallow built-in dark taupe wooden bookshelf is at right.

White shiplap covers several walls of this modern farmhouse style home’s dining room (Collov Home Design for Unsplash) | Barn doors hung from black metal frames mix rustic texture and industrial style (Adobe Stock Image) | Vertical slat paneling creates an accent wall in a minimalist apartment (Max Rahubovskiy for Pexels)

Shiplap

Shiplap horizontal wall slats became hugely popular over the past decade. Designer Joanna Gaines boosted the use of shiplap frequently on her TV shows. But this staple of modern farmhouse style grew too popular too quickly. It was all over TV decorating shows, retail showrooms, and design advice sites. Today most designers consider it past its prime. It was so popular that it’ll be around for years to come, but it no longer feels as fresh.

Wood Slat Accents

Wood slat accent walls have become hugely trendy over the past year. They add a lot of texture while feeling minimalist and modern. This kind of paneling is certainly attractive and quite of-the-moment. It’s showing up in a lot of hotel lobbies and show homes. But slat panels are hard, so they don’t dampen noise or visually soften a room. Also, like the paneling that was so popular in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s distinctive. That means it will look dated more quickly than a standard flat wall. It’ll be much more expensive to update or replace than wallpaper or paint.

I think of slat walls as today’s version of the rustic wooden barn doors that popped up all over the place in the past decade. They’re attractive, but very trendy, gaining popularity remarkably quickly. They’re like 1970’s paneling and 2010’s shiplap and barn doors—everywhere, and likely to look dated within a few years. And like shiplap, slat panels attract dust. If you install them, clean them regularly with the brush attachment on your vacuum.

Decorate in Three Dimensions

Decorating with texture brings dimensionality to your home. Rooms with a multiple light sources, plays of light and shadow, a variety of materials, and objects placed at differing depths and distances feel more like natural landscapes. We’re naturally drawn to the sensory variety they provide. So look around your home. Imagine ways that you can layer and emphasize textures throughout your space. You deserve a home that feels as well as looks good.

At top:

Industrial open-plan lodge | Aaron Huber for Unsplash

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