Look We’re Loving: Murals

Both of us are drawn to homes with a bit of magic – places that feel like if you were to pull out just the right book, the shelf might swing open to reveal a hidden staircase – or maybe a whole other world.  Our favorite rooms are ones that, through art and objects, spark the imagination and make you feel transported.  Today we’re sharing a collection of rooms that use large scale art and murals to create an otherworldly space we’d love to visit.

Do you have a favorite?  Have you (or would you) put in mural in your own home?

15 responses on “Look We’re Loving: Murals

  1. Katy Gilmore

    What a wonderful, old-fashioned, modern idea! I love the last three – each in its own way. Great post about something I never think about except in dining rooms in Pompeii or Jane Austen!

  2. Carol Crump Bryner

    This post took me back to my childhood when my mother, several times a year, took me to G. Fox & Company in Hartford, Connecticut to shop for clothes. We always ate lunch in the “Connecticut Room” where the walls were covered with murals of scenery similar to the image you posted of the door surrounded by landscape. I love all these examples you show – they are so brave and almost breathtaking.

    1. k80bennett

      Thanks for sharing your story! They are brave – I think you have to commit completely to pull it off. Although the self-adhesive ones lower the risk a little.

  3. Laura (PA Pict)

    I absolutely love murals in public spaces. I now live in the suburbs of Philadelphia which is rather famous for its murals which I must say are quite spectacular. In the domestic sphere, I think they work best in large rooms where one can stand back from them and appreciate them as a work of art since close up they just become abstracted pattern. My favourite of the images you shared is actually the green splash perhaps because it makes me think of my messy art creating or precisely because it is more abstract. I would not, however, have a mural at home as I like my walls to be fairly plain so that they showcase works of art.

  4. mcncampion

    I went to G. Fox for back-to-school clothes shopping with my Momma, too, CCB! I like nearly all of these, but absolutely LOVE the “green splash” (as Laura calls it). Really love that. Makes me want to do it!! I just now walked around my house, looking at walls ….. hmmmmmmm …..

    Great post, Katie!

  5. mcncampion

    Oh – and also – this post made me remember being in a very fancy Park Avenue apartment (a very big, very expensive one) that had a huge dining room with Revolutionary War (I think) battle scene-murals on the walls (within panels, like the 4th one you have posted here). These were colored, tho, not black and white. I remember a lot of red … (maybe because of the Red Coats 🙂 … It was very impressive, but in that particular room – despite its size – it felt … crowded, dining along with all of those soldiers and their rearing horses.

  6. panda flannel

    Mural, you say, and mural, I give you: http://tinypic.com/r/2mh7zeo/8

    This is painted in one of the bedrooms of my house—in fact, the entire room used to be painted as an enormous underwater mural (of similar artistic quality to the mermaid).

    When I lived in that room I covered the entire thing floor to ceiling with sheets of butcher paper because I was engaged in the most surreal landlord-tenant argument of all time: all I wanted to do was paint my walls white, but my landlord refused to let me paint over the naked hippie mermaid mural (I ended up moving out of that room, mostly because of that). A later roommate convinced the landlord to let her paint over the other three walls and the ceiling, but the mermaid survived to forever taunt us all with her glaring cocktail-olive eyes and weirdly pointed boobs.

    All of that to say, I am now hard-pressed to find murals at all like-able, but the ones you posted are totally amazing and making me reconsider. Especially love that watercolor one.

  7. Judy lehman

    Long ago in my eastern stone home built circa 1900 the interior hallway and stairs were f stone with wrought iron capped in brass banisters. I papered the walls down and upstairs with greenery and trees and it delighted many especially on winter when I had spring inside! I can’t find a photo darn!

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