The dark room has a long and glamorous pedigree. Think of the panelled library, the deep-green study, the dining room that glows by candlelight: for centuries the most atmospheric rooms in the finest houses were the dark ones, and for good reason.
Darkness flatters. It softens edges, hides a multitude of sins, and wraps a space in an intimacy no amount of brilliant white can conjure. Somewhere in the pursuit of light and air we came to treat dark walls as a mistake, but the pendulum has swung firmly back. Eken in Charcoal, from Sandberg's Sandberg Edition, puts a whole charcoal woodland around a room, and Willow Poem in Onyx, from Coordonné's Forbidden City, draws gold willow across near black.
"A dark room, done well, does not feel gloomy. It feels like being held."
Kashmir in Onyx is the same instinct at a smaller scale, and Celandine in Forest, by William Morris at Home, shows that going dark need not mean going black: a deep green does the same work and keeps the pattern legible.
Eken, Charcoal by Sandberg
Willow Poem, Onyx by Coordonné
Kashmir, Onyx by Coordonné
Celandine, Forest by William Morris at Home
The Myth of the Small Dark Room
The great objection to dark walls is the old belief that they make a room feel smaller, and it is largely a myth. A pale colour in a small or awkward room draws attention to its boundaries, showing you exactly where the walls are. A dark colour does the opposite: it blurs the edges and lets the corners dissolve into shadow, so the room feels not cramped but cocooning.
Texture helps enormously here, because it gives a dark wall something to catch the light on. Maroma in Navy, from Thibaut's Grasscloth Resource 7, and Cañizo, from Coordonné's Raffias Eco, are both real woven fibre; Bizen in Anthracite is a deep plaster-like surface; and Venera in Ebony puts gold brushstrokes on black so the wall moves as you do.
Maroma, Navy by Thibaut
Bizen, Anthracite by Casamance
Cañizo, Blue / Navy by Coordonné
Venera, Ebony by Sketch Twenty 3
"Dark walls do not shrink a small room. They blur its edges and let it feel boundless."
This is why some of the most successful dark rooms are the smallest: a windowless cloakroom, a boxy snug, a low-ceilinged study, turned into jewel boxes rather than exposed by the light. Far from being a brave choice for a large, grand room, deep colour is often the making of a small, difficult one.
How and Where to Use It
Dark and moody wallpaper comes into its own in the rooms you use after dark, where it can glow by lamplight. A deep, saturated design, an inky floral, a dark botanical, a near-black geometric, turns a dining room or a study into something enveloping, and makes a bedroom feel restful and den-like. April Blossom in Navy and Paper Flora are both florals that only really work this dark, and Eternal Weave in Emerald is dense enough to read as texture from across a room.
April Blossom, Navy by York Wallcoverings
Paper Flora, Navy by Josephine Munsey
Eternal Weave, Emerald by Graham & Brown
The effect is richest when you commit: take the colour over the woodwork and ceiling too, so the whole room reads as one shadowy whole. Lighting is everything. Forget the single bright overhead bulb and reach instead for lamps and wall lights, pools of warm, low light that let the darkness do its atmospheric work.
Browse charcoal and navy for the deepest colourways, and order a sample to see how a paper shifts from daylight to lamplight, which is when a dark one truly comes alive. We spend so long chasing the light. Sometimes the most beautiful thing a room can do is embrace the dark, and invite you to settle into it.
