A decorative finish is the cheapest way to change how a room feels — and the easiest to overdo. How to pick the wall, and what to settle before any paint goes on.
A decorative finish does something flat colour cannot: it gives a surface depth and texture, so the wall changes as the light moves across it during the day. Done on the right surface it makes a room. Done on every surface it makes a room exhausting.
Choose the wall the room already points at
The best candidate is usually the wall your eye goes to anyway — behind a bed, behind a sofa, the chimney breast, the wall you see first from the doorway. A feature finish works by contrast with the calm surfaces around it. If all four walls are doing something, none of them is a feature.
The surface has to be better prepared, not less
It is tempting to assume texture hides a rough wall. Some finishes do forgive minor imperfection, but many are worse than flat paint — a raking light across a textured surface exaggerates every dent and every patch. The preparation is the same as for a good paint job, and sometimes more thorough.
Floors and other surfaces count too
Decorative coatings are not only for walls. A garage floor, a basement, a porch or a patio can take a hard-wearing coloured coating, often with a flake or aggregate broadcast into it, that turns a grey slab into a finished surface and is far easier to keep clean than bare concrete.
Agree the sample before the wall
No two decorative finishes come out identical, because they are worked by hand — that is the point of them. So the finish is worked out with you first: a sample board or a section of the actual wall, in the actual light of that room, until the depth and the colour are what you want. That sample becomes the reference for the whole wall, and it is far better to change your mind at that stage than after.
Living with it
Ask what a finish needs before you commit to it. Some can be wiped down; some are more delicate and belong in a dining room rather than a hallway with children and bicycles in it. And keep a note of what went into it — a hand-worked finish is much easier to repair later when there is a record of how it was made.
Questions about your own project?
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