Room to Gather In: Dining Room Wallpaper for the Hosting Season

Of all the rooms in a house, the dining room is the one guests spend longest looking at. They arrive, sit down and stay for hours. Whatever is on the walls around them becomes the backdrop to every course, every toast and every conversation that runs on past midnight, and never more so than through the hosting season, from the holidays to the new year.

Dining room wallpaper is a wallcovering chosen for the dining room, where a deeper, more enveloping design suits a space used mostly in the evening and for gathering. That use shapes the choice. A dining room is seen in low, ambient evening light more often than in daylight, from a seat rather than in passing, and by people with time to look closely. The dining room wallpaper ideas below, drawn from our collections and from dining rooms we have helped to dress, are made for that kind of attention.

Three things distinguish the dining room from the rest of the house. 

The first is light. Evening meals tend to be lit low, by a pendant over the table, wall lights, lamps and candles, and that warm, softer light picks out paint, metallic finishes and embroidered thread in a way flat daylight does not.

The second is the eye line. Guests sit at a fixed height for the length of a meal, often facing the same stretch of wall, with time to take in one part of the design closely.

The third is time. A hallway is passed through; a dining room is occupied for hours at a stretch. A design with detail to discover over the course of a dinner gives guests something to return to between conversations, which is why a dining room deserves as much thought as any room in the house.

Chinoiserie has a long history in the dining room, reaching back to the eighteenth century, when hand-painted papers of birds and blossom lined the rooms where Europe’s great houses entertained. A chinoiserie dining room today can take that tradition in very different directions.

Nonsuch in Bonadea is a romantic chinoiserie with a distinctly European feel. Magnolias, fruit trees and peonies, many drawn from historical papers, are hand-painted on a warm, sand-toned ground of pearl-washed teapaper, with vivid pinks, grass greens, blues and yellows set off by white highlights. The colourway takes its name from Bonadea on Pimlico Road, where it is installed in their Winter Garden Room.

Hirondelles, our collaboration with the French crystal house Lalique, brings glassware to the walls. Swallows and dahlias are rendered as if in satin-finish crystal, hand-painted and embroidered on silk brushed with pearlescent paint that recalls the shimmer of frosted glass. In Saphir, blue and teal accents sit against white silk, and the pearl ground catches the candlelight much as crystal does on a laid table.

Prunus draws on the tradition of plum blossom painting, pairing loose, gestural brushwork with the lustre of hand-embroidered silk thread. In Bitumen, a gunmetal strata ground creates a strong panelling effect, set against blossoms in electric blue and yellow. The design comes in three layouts, made for rooms with low or high furniture and narrow joinery, so it can be planned around a sideboard or a run of built-in cabinetry.

A green dining room has long been a favourite for hosting: calm by day, rich after dark, and easy to dress for any occasion.

Ogata celebrates the flowers of all four seasons. Inspired by the Japanese artist Tawaraya Sotatsu, it sets stylised leaves beside richly detailed peonies. In Forest Green, the ground is a deep, saturated green that recalls dense pine forest, a grounding backdrop against which the brighter botanicals stand out. It is printed and hand-finished on rayonne.

Rays of Plumeria, from our collaboration with Harris Reed, explores the tension between order and fluidity. Printed and hand-finished on gilded paper, Emerald Desires moves from emerald to forest to sage, strung through with copper dots that read like light through a canopy. Conceived to work across ceilings as well as walls, it’s hand-gilded ground has the gilded ground beneath to warms the green as evening comes in.

Olive Grove, designed with Sophie Paterson, centres on the olive tree, known as the Tree of Eternity, its twisted trunk in naturalistic tones and its branches dotted with fruit. In Tuscan, soft celadon leaves are hand-painted on Enoki Dupion silk, whose raw texture gives the wall a tactile quality. Sophie has said the leaves take her mind to Mediterranean summers, and in the dining room of her own home the design brings something of that long, outdoor table indoors.

Travertine began with an accident. Experimenting with metallic paints, our co-founder and Design Director Lizzie Deshayes wiped her brush on a piece of linen, and the streaks it left resembled the veining of natural stone. The finished design is built from brushed, layered washes of iridescent metallic paint on silk. In Titan, those washes run from bronze to gold over a caramel-toned silk, with occasional flashes of fiery red, giving the room the warmth of a fire before a single candle is lit.

Wilde Dreams, also from our collaboration with Harris Reed, reimagines a classic naturescape: hand-painted peonies unfurl among meandering branches, with bumblebees hidden in the scene as a nod to the nickname given to Reed by his husband. In Espresso Noir, the design’s signature moiré silk is a rich cacao, overlaid with the pattern in blue-purple. Hand-painted and embroidered, it is a design that reveals more of itself the more to a guest leaning in across the table longer a guest lingers across the table.

A dining room hosts long lunches as well as late dinners. Bucolic Marquetry takes its cue from the art of marquetry, in which fragments of wood were patiently pieced together into botanical motifs and scenes. Its panoramic landscape of rolling hills and foliage was first painted entirely by hand, then rendered into print on waxed paper, keeping the irregularity of the original brushwork. In Bleached Oak, hazy, sun-faded tones sit on a warm ivory ground, giving the room the character of a softly weathered mural that holds through the afternoon and into the evening.

Hotels and restaurants test dining room ideas at full scale, night after night, and the best of them translate readily to a home. Three of our restaurant wallpaper projects show the range, from light and sunlit to dark and dramatic.

At the goop Villa at The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, our collaborative design Along the Wild Path in Dawn surrounds the dining table with a cherry-blossom chinoiserie, hand-painted and embroidered on silk. The pale ground keeps the table bright through breakfast and lunch, while woodland creatures and fungi woven through the branches give guests something to find. A room made for gathering doesn’t need to be a dark one.

At The Goring, the Dining Room reopened in 2024 with a chinoiserie of our own, created with interior designer Russell Sage and painted directly onto silk prepared with layered washes of green. Nothing repeats, and the hotel’s wit carries onto the walls: monkeys steal champagne and burst out of cakes, details guests discover course by course. The base of the design has since joined our collection as Haines, and in Regent Green its peonies, painted in fresh whites on a grass-green antique silk
ground, bring that same painterly character to a luxury dining room at home.

At the other end of the spectrum, Mott 32 in Hong Kong, designed by Joyce Wang, is lit almost entirely by pendants. Cibar in a bespoke Odyssey colourway, hand-painted and embroidered on silk in a stellar-blue palette, gives the restaurant its cinematic, after-dark character. The principle holds in a home dining room used mostly by night: against a dark ground, hand-worked detail comes forward as the lights get low.

Good dining room design begins at the table. Before choosing a wallpaper, consider which walls guests will face once seated and where the eye lands above sideboards, mirrors and artwork. Many of our designs can be tailored, so key motifs can be placed at that height and composed around the room’s doors and windows.

Plan the lighting alongside the walls. Pendants, candles and wall lights all fall on the surface differently, and metallic paint, pearl washes and embroidered thread each respond to where that light sits. Deciding the two together, rather than one after the other, gives the scheme its fullest effect.

Allow time for the making. Our bespoke designs are made to order and to the room, so the earlier a dining room is planned, the sooner it is ready for its first gathering. For faster-paced projects, our shop offers wallpapers ready to order online.

A dining room is remembered for the evenings spent in it. Long after the table is cleared, the walls are what guests recall of the room in which they gathered.

Working on a dining room? Explore our designs  ·  Plan your project  ·  Speak to our design team or request a sample