In Jermaine Gallacher’s interiors column for Vogue, the maverick London-based furniture dealer and designer offers his tips on taking interiors building blocks—bookshelves to blinds, curtains to chairs—and switching them up to reinvent your living space at any budget. Strange, surprising, and sometimes even sorcerous, here’s how you can do it too. Mirrors not included.
My earliest memories of accent walls—or as they are sometimes referred to, “feature walls”—were those of my childhood home. Once, when I was a kid, my mum covered an entire wall of our sitting room in cork: a very “in” thing to do at the time, as I was later told. To be totally honest, however, it was less of a design choice and more a matter of necessity, placed there to mask the giant patches of damp brought about by a Marlboro Lights billboard on the other side of the wall. Still, I always thought it looked like the bee’s knees—and to this day harbor a soft spot for cork walls. And Marlboro Lights.
When I was growing up, it was the great British home makeover programs of the early noughties—Changing Rooms, House Doctor, and later on 60 Minute Makeover—that I turned to for my interiors fix. I remember Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, sleeves-a-swinging, drawing giant hieroglyphics all over a bedroom wall with a golden pen to recreate Tutankhamun’s tomb for a floor-to-ceiling headboard. Or Anna Ryder-Richardson wallpapering a chimney breast wall, normally in some bracing, Barbie-pink abstract floral. And of course, Sue Barker was the queen of the DIY stencil (when she wasn’t too busy smashing teapots, that is).
Garish wallpapers and stencils aside, though, what I really loved was the can-do energy, pure creativity, and outright ballsiness of those years. It’s so easy (and boring) to snub trends from the past when they become ubiquitous. But quite frankly I don’t care about trends, or being cliched, or what any so-called tastemaker says: I still love an accent wall, and I believe they are the perfect opportunity to show off your creativity and decorating flair.
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