Dining Room Wallpaper Possibilities

As you know, we live in a pretty classic 100-year old DC rowhouse that has retained its original footprint. That means our dining room is in the middle of the first floor and doesn’t get any of its own natural light. The doorway to the living room is pretty wide but the living room windows face north, so not much sunlight makes it to the dining room that way; the two pairs of French doors leading to the sleeping porch, which faces south and gets tons of light throughout the day, don’t let much through either.

I decided to embrace the darkness when we first decorated in 2018: we painted the dining room Benjamin Moore’s Evening Dove, a charcoal-tinged navy. As Homes and Gardens observes, “Instead of trying to create the illusion of light (which is always going to be tricky), color experts recommend leaning into the low light and creating a cozy, dark, and cocooning space.” We get tons of compliments on it - and have had a few friends actually use it for their own homes after seeing it in ours, which is the most flattering thing ever - but I just found out that Jon wants to go lighter after we renovate.

Well, that threw me for a loop! I didn’t want to repaint with Evening Dove but had planned on trying a few other saturated blues or greens and had envisioned keeping the dining room on the darker side, but I went back to the drawing board for the sake of our marriage. Even though the new dining room will get more light when we open up the wall to the kitchen and replace the French doors to the back room with an opening that mirrors the one from the living room, it will still be an internal room and I would rather not paint it a light color.

I tentatively broached the idea of wallpaper, something with a white background but a darker pattern as a compromise, and I was shocked when he said he was open to it! We started by looking at cheeky toile de mer options, which he loved:

I’d prefer something a more subtle, so I changed tack and showed him some designs that evoked the ocean. He didn’t hate these:

I kept scrolling Spoonflower, and eventually stumbled on what might be the perfect combination of quirky and abstract:

Called Old Fantasy Map with Happy Sea Monsters, this pattern looks abstract and almost cloudy from a distance but, up close, reveals castles, shipwrecks, and, yes, sea monsters. We’re definitely going to order a sample when the time comes!

Toile de Mer / Mythical Sea Creatures Toile de Jouy / Inked Nessie
Wave-Sky Blue and Sea / Watercolor Waves / Coastal Blue Grey Coral Reef
Old Fantasy Map