For years the safest thing you could do to a wall was nothing at all. Paint it a soft neutral and hang something tasteful. That era is ending and the rooms I find myself lingering in now, in hotels, in restaurants, in friends’ homes, are the ones with a point of view, and very often that point of view starts on the walls. Feathr, the Finnish artisan wallpaper house, has set out six ideas it believes will define interiors in 2027. Taken together they describe homes that are bolder, more personal and far less predictable. Here are the ones worth knowing.
Bespoke, built around a story
Made-to-order wallpaper is not new. What has changed is how far the idea of bespoke now goes. Choosing your own colourway or adjusting the scale of a print is simply the baseline. The real luxury is a design drawn for one room and the life lived in it. The same instinct is running through the wider luxury world. Rolls-Royce clients commission cars to mark family milestones, Cartier’s special-order clients have their pets painted onto watch dials. Walls are following, with motifs and artworks created around a house and the people in it.
Feathr’s Sapporo Pistachio mural shows how soft this can feel, a green chinoiserie of blossoming branches, carried from the wall onto a folding screen, beside a plum velvet chair and a rose marble table.
Cobalt moves from the runway to the wall
Green has been the colour of the decade so far, and it is not going anywhere. But the accent everyone will be reaching for in 2027 is cobalt. It lit up the spring/summer 2026 shows at Loewe, Jil Sander, Versace and Stella McCartney, and it is now making its way indoors.
The best way to think of it is the cobalt handbag of the season, a confident flash of blue rather than a whole room drenched in it. That might be a blue thread running through a botanical print, an abstract picked out in cobalt, or one immersive mural that lifts an otherwise quiet room.
Feathr’s Kasumi mural does exactly this. Herons and blossom drawn in blue on a pale ground, with the colour echoed in a velvet armchair, deep blue bedlinen and a rug. Calm, but unmistakably current.
The fifth wall
Anyone who has stayed in a great hotel knows the feeling of a room that silently comforts. That sense of being wrapped is now finding its way into private homes. Rather than a single feature wall, the paper runs around every wall and continues up and over the ceiling, the surface we have left plain white for far too long. The trick is in the details. Paint the cornicing and woodwork to match, choose fabrics in the same tones, and the pattern seems to have no edges at all. It is the opposite of stripped back, and that is entirely the point.
One of Feathr’s images shows how dramatic this can be, a meadow of painted trees and wildflowers on the walls, a deep teal ceiling and cornice above, and two crystal chandeliers hanging in the middle of it all.
Walls that look like paintings
The gallery wall of framed photographs has had its moment. In 2027, the wall itself becomes the painting. As collectible design has gone mainstream, the line between decoration and art has blurred, and wallpaper is following.
Painterly murals leave the repeating pattern behind for large-scale scenes developed from original artworks. It is a return to something very old, hand-painted scenic papers were the height of fashion in grand houses of the 18th century. The difference now is that you live within the picture rather than hanging it.
Feathr’s Apuila classical panorama is a lovely example, used in a powder room. A lake, a domed palazzo and distant mountains under a soft sky, set against a sculpted veined-marble basin, brass sconces and a round mirror. It turns the smallest room in the house into the one guests remember.
Gloss is back
After years of chalky, matte everything, shine has returned. At Milan Design Week 2026, lacquer turned up on everything from sideboards to upholstered chairs, and walls are catching the light too. Metallic papers in gold, silver and bronze reflect what is around them, so a pattern seems to appear and fade as the light moves through the day. The advice is to pair them with matte finishes, so the effect is depth rather than dazzle.
Feathr’s Volterra mural is the one I would hang tomorrow, fine blossoming branches over a burnished gold ground, behind an ochre velvet bed, tiger and leopard cushions and a sculptural black armchair. Glamorous, warm, and not remotely brash.
Handmade texture
The sixth idea on Feathr’s list is texture that feels made by hand, papers that bring the softness of craft back to the wall. It sits naturally alongside everything above, none of these rooms are meant to look like show rooms.
Put all six together and one idea comes through, the lived-in, collected home. Walls are no longer a polite backdrop. They are where personality, craft and art meet, whether through a pattern made for you, a flash of cobalt, a ceiling that finally joins in, a painted landscape or a little shimmer of gold. The rooms that will feel most current next year are the ones that look like nobody else’s. I can’t think of a better style.
