Do not leave the walls in your home bare. Follow these simple ideas from interior designer Joelle Eyeson to create a feature wall in your home.

Our minds will instinctively look for one part of the room to focus our attention on. This may be the biggest piece of furniture, the most interesting piece artwork, or a bold light fitting.

Even if we are just redecorating our home, this is our opportunity to play with each element in our rooms and tie them all together with a feature wall. More importantly than following a trend, you must be 100 percent sure that you can make your feature wall work for you.

Feature walls are certainly experiencing a wave of popularity at the moment, but that does not mean that they are limited to the confines of ultra modern and contemporary homes.

A large, blank wall is an incredible opportunity to bring your more creative ideas into any room of the house. The idea of a feature wall is that you can make a focal point out of an entire wall, or lighten up one wall with cool African artwork.

Living rooms are the usual place for adding a feature wall. They lend themselves easily to the option because they are often the largest open spaces in the home and they usually have a straightforward layout. We spend a lot of time in the living room so we are often more willing to invest time and resources into getting the design of these spaces perfect for us.

A feature wall is your chance to experiment, push your boundaries and make sure your feature colour is something that you like, and something that complements your home. If you want to paint a feature wall, tester pots should become your best friend. Game in the Accra Mall has a dulux paint mixing station, which is great for having a few tester pots to experiment with. It’s a way to test the waters of a colour before you commit.

Deeper colours will add intimacy and closeness to larger rooms, bright colours will add fun and modernity to cream and white based rooms, and red will add a pop of passion to a bedroom without overpowering you. A feature wall can also be a middle ground between you and your children, giving them one wall of the garish, bright colours they had their eyes on, and allowing you to keep your home looking stylish.

An alternative to paint and block colours is to add wood paneling, stone cladding, tiles or wallpaper as a feature wall. With any feature wall, the key is to make sure that it works for you. An entire wall of colour adds an entirely new element to your room and can change the design atmosphere quite dramatically. What works for one person, won’t always transcend into our own homes, so be prepared to play around with mood boards, tester pots and your imagination until you find the correct solution for you and your family.

About the author

Joelle Eyeson is an interior designer based in Accra and London. She will be providing a dose of home décor tips for your home or office. She will also be sharing some amazing finds in and around Accra.  For more on home and interior decoration visit her website www.joelleeyeson.com