Wood on the Walls

January 7, 2014

Site Staff,

One of our favorite things about mountain homes? More often than not, they showcase natural materials that just beg to be touched, like walls covered with beautiful wood. While the material may be a standby, the applications are endless. Here are a few of our favorite ways to clad a wall with wood.

Architect Reid Smith designed this home bar‘s textural wall of log slices. “It’s a natural material used more playfully than we usually would,” he says:

In this bedroom, interior designer Hunter Dominick paneled the walls with a simple plaid pattern of reclaimed wood; behind the paneling is a herringbone-patterned grasscloth wallcovering. A plaid duvet cover echoes the wall pattern:

The design team for the 2011 Home of the Year lined this hallway with birch trees. The team at Highline Partners sourced more than 100 trees with a three-inch diameter (“not as easy as you might think,” says project contractor Todd Thesing) and adhered them to the plywood wall—which was covered with a light coat of plaster—with hidden screws:

Rustic reclaimed wood from Austria lines the wall of this cozy guest room, where the bed is covered with crisp red-and-white linens from Switzerland. Old beams from Salzburg show the hand-chiseled notches that were used in homebuilding more than a century ago:

English 19th-century lanterns of iron, tole (lacquered metalware) and etched glass from Coup d’Etat hang from this living room‘s lofty bow-trussed ceiling with chevron-patterned wood decking. Interior shutters decorated with sapphire-blue-painted heart cutouts conceal a home office and attic storage:

This luxury bachelor pad is a hat tip to the rural structures of the homeowner’s native Nebraska. A “grain silo” clad with reclaimed wood salvaged from old rural buildings in Iowa and Nova Scotia acts as the entry and foyer. “We wanted the house to feel like it came from the earth, not like it was dropped upon it,” says architect Andrew Abraham:

Sometimes, using a natural wood wallcovering just isn’t practical—or possible. That’s where wallpaper comes in, like this playful pattern from Andrew Martin that interior designer Abby Hetherington chose for a cheeky riff on the traditional log wall. What do you think? Still prefer the real thing?