Here’s How to Pattern Drench Your Home, According to Designers

Move over, color drenching; pattern drenching has entered the chat.

Our favorite new trend for adding energy and personality to any room is also a decidedly old one. Finding a favorite print and using it everywhere — walls, ceilings, furniture, we could go on — has been in practice for centuries. Victorian decorators went wild for motifs, but the pattern drenching that’s all the rage today is no Gilded Age throwback.

The modern take on this design idea is all about cultivating coziness and creativity with wallpapers and fabrics that repeat and combine. Exhibit A: This dreamy Philadelphia bedroom, where designer Michelle Gage evoked the character and comfort of a boutique hotel. “We wrapped the ceiling and walls in this fresh floral and mixed it with juxtaposing prints in the bedding and rug,” she explained.

Getting started is as easy as identifying a pattern you already have in your home and doubling down or riffing on it. To learn more about how to layer patterns throughout your space, take a spin through our experts’ well-embellished wonderlands.

Feeling fidgety about turning what could function as an accent wall into a space-enveloping statement? “Commit to bold!” says Lexington, Kentucky-based designer (and pattern-plying phenom) Isabel Ladd, who created this dazzling bedroom. “If this wallpaper only bloomed on one wall, it wouldn’t have had the same jaw-dropping effect as when it envelops the room entirely. Any pattern you LOVE deserves to be repeated.”

She’ll say it again if you’re still skeptical. “If you’re worried about whether you’ll get tired of a bold, busy wallpaper, I encourage you to flip that sentiment and think: ‘What if it brings me so much joy?’”

With that wallpaper as her starting point, Isabel layered in a dozen other patterns, including borders in another floral for the ceiling and baseboards. “I always want the eye to travel from statement piece to statement piece,” she explains. “I never want one or two hero-prints in a room. I want more, more, more ... because too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

If you want to tap into the wallpaper-on-the-ceiling trend, Isabel knows just where to start. "Pattern drenching is so important in a nursery; the thought of a child's brain getting all the visual stimulation and nourishment of these patterns and colors makes my heart sing!” she says. She decided to paint the walls light blue to ground the space, then she chose bold patterns textiles. (Bonus: Those motifs will do an excellent job of disguising thrills and spills over time.) “Since a baby spends so much time in the crib, I figured they'd — more than anyone else — appreciate the pattern on the ceiling, the ‘fifth wall,’” she adds.

Tasked with designing a girl’s bedroom that would feel cozy in her elementary-school years and adapt as she entered her teens, Isabel drenched the room with a medium-scale floral pattern. She used that same pattern to upholster the headboard and create a bed skirt for a polished look. “To shake things up a bit, I incorporated florals of different scales and textures in the bed pillows and lampshade trims, which I contrasted with a gingham chair seat and an antique rug,” she says. “Chartreuse accents spark a jolt in this beloved bedroom.”

Isabel’s client had loved Cole & Sons’ whimsical Secret Garden pattern for years, and she knew it was the perfect choice for their primary bath. She echoed the leaves’ rich tone in the room’s molding and used a paler version of the same hue for the ceiling. Then, she contrasted them with fiery carmine underfoot and sunny yellow accessories. “The antique rug has patterns and colors not found in the wallpaper," says Isabel. "But mixed with the modern lights, glamorous chandelier, vintage artwork, seagrass baskets and an antique table-turned-vanity, all the pieces collide into a collected and treasured aesthetic.” Bathrooms and powder rooms are a budget-friendly place to try your hand at pattern drenching. (Smaller rooms equal less wallpaper to buy.)

Isabel performed similarly impressive feats of coordination in this tropical bath, where the rich tropical blue of the wallpaper’s leaves repeats on the ceiling and the foliage's striking coral carries through the trim and fixtures. There are a whopping six florals here — balanced just so.

“The key to unifying florals on florals on florals is to stick to a tight color palette, then vary the scale and vary the pattern repeat,” she explains. “The wallpaper florals are loose but with negative space, the shower curtain florals are loose but dense, the window shade florals are structured and ‘formal.’ All the other florals are dainty and lean bohemian.” She grounded the space with a geometric floor tile and alternated tones to create a subtle stripe.

To reimagine the sitting room adjoining her client’s larger living area, Michelle Gage both literally reframed the space (by widening the opening) and gave it a figurative flip (with showstopping Katie Kime wallpaper). The colorful camel motif created the perfect backdrop for the retro chairs her client had inherited from her grandmother. Reupholstered with a camel-complementing Ralph Lauren botanical print and accented with red floral pillows (a color that recurs in the seats’ blooms and the camels’ saddles), these inherited pieces are now the costars of a decidedly up-to-date design.

This walk-in closet was the perfect occasion to go for broke with Cole & Sons’ fabulous Thistle pattern, which climbs up the walls and across the vaulted ceiling in high style (no pun intended). Michelle added matching merlot paint to an alcove and accented her bouquet with Abigail Borg’s Feverfew pattern on a tufted ottoman — with subtle-but-stunning merlot piping, for good measure. A geometric area rug brings another textile to the mix and echoes the walls’ spiky leaves.

Designer Erica Bryen brought pattern-on-pattern-on-pattern drama to this southern California bedroom by limiting herself to velvety black and ivory patterns (with glints of metallics in lighting and nightstand hardware to add opulence). That careful composition continues in the space’s symmetrical arrangement; there’s a lot of visual complexity in this room, to be sure, but its irregularity is minimal. Finally, the pale duvet is simplicity itself — and the perfect place for the eye (and the homeowner) to rest.

Boston designer Cecilia Casagrande’s combination of a vivid, large-scale wallpaper (Timorous Beasties’ iconic Merian Palm) with two hexagonal grey tile patterns and a nubbly striped chair in beach glass blue-greens sounds like too much — and yet she sticks the landing thanks to her thoughtful balance of crisp angles underfoot with organic forms on vertical planes. This interplay is unquestionably a lot of look, which is why it suits a transitional space so well. If you’re trying to create a sense of flow, pattern drenching will get things moving in no time.

This chic Brooklyn living room’s star is also its supporting cast, thanks to designer Alison Jennison’s thoughtful use and re-use of Eskayel’s Edera pattern. The moody floral creates a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper frame for the fireplace, while a linen-based version on the Roman shade adds coziness, and a pair of matching throw pillows brings cohesion to the eclectic mix of cushions. A material throughline, like this, can create a space that feels uniquely yours.