Snug Makeover Using Mixed Wallpapers

*Today’s post was made possible by Fancy Walls, and features gifted product for the purposes of a candid review. All opinions are my own.

Our snug seating area has been one of those spaces that has taken an extra long time to figure out. We think that it was originally meant to be used as an eat-in dining space or breakfast nook, but John and I have never had more than one dining space in our past homes, so it felt a little redundant with our formal dining room just a few paces away. It’s also a little tricky because the space acts as an open thoroughfare between the kitchen, garage entry, sunroom, and living room. There are a lot of pathways that need to remain open, so initially we just styled a buffet console unit on the long wall to serve as additional kitchen storage without blocking flow.

It wasn’t long before we realized that we would actually really love to use this room as a seating area because every time our family came over, people naturally gravitated toward this space. We needed somewhere for them sit down, so we put a couch in the room and haven’t looked back since. Turns out that a couch, coffee table, and small swivel chair all fit nicely within the room without blocking foot traffic. The furniture itself has changed over the years, but the snug seating area function of the room hasn’t budged.

Since the snug is wide open to our kitchen, I knew that the design was always going to need to coordinate with the kitchen to some degree. When we hung light blue custom Fancy Walls wallpaper in the kitchen, I decided to stop it right at the window that’s situated between the snug and kitchen so that I didn’t have to wallpaper the entire open space. I hid the break behind our curtains, and then painted the snug a soft blue color below the existing chair rail that matched the kitchen wallpaper so it felt cohesive. It worked well enough, as you’ll see in those photos above, but after a year or so, I started to feel like I wanted the wallpaper in the kitchen to go all the way across the open space, and that I might like a little more depth and contrast below it under the chair rail, too.

After doing a bit of searching on the Fancy Walls website, I ultimately decided to order a sample of their “Sage Nouveau” wallpaper to try along with a leftover sample of our custom colored kitchen wallpaper, “Candice.” I was excited to see that the pairing somehow worked perfectly! I loved how the four shades of interlocking teal in the “Sage” wallpaper coordinated with our light blue “Candice” pattern, and the looping designs complemented each other really nicely. So, I placed my order for the full run of both, and got to work as soon as the rolls of peel-and-stick paper arrived.

Of course, the fact that our kitchen wallpaper now runs throughout the entire space makes our snug feel like more of an intentional, integrated part of the room as a whole, but I also love how the richer color-way of the “Sage” paper below gives the snug a personality all its own. I think this room was really lacking good contrast before, and the darker wallpaper brings out the cool original features of the space, especially that lovely chair rail.

I’m so smitten with the dark color on the lower half of the snug, that I’m now considering painting the back side of our kitchen peninsula a dark teal color to bring some of that richness over to that side of the room. What do you think? Let me know in the comments your thoughts on our pair of Fancy Walls patterns, and if you think I should bring a darker color into the kitchen next!