Creating the perfect summer room in time for the sunny season can be a breeze. Summertimes are all about sea, sand, holidays, ice cream, terraced bars, family trips, and enjoying the great outdoors, so why not infuse your home with the same laid-back, good-time atmosphere?

At I Want Wallpaper, we’ve put together our best suggestions for how you can create a cool and bright summer room that traps the relaxation and positive feelings that go with our favourite time of year. Read on for some DIY summer decorating tips.

Colour schemes

The first thing you need to visualise when creating your perfect summer room is colour. You want to go for something bright and reflective to bounce all that extra natural sunlight around your room, even on days when it’s inevitably overcast…

When decorating for summer, lemon, peach and lime are ideal choices popularly used by designers for different psychological effects.

Fill the downstairs with vases of yellow flowers, swap your bathroom towels for a yellow fabric, and treat yourself to a yellow sofa to create a sunnier and happier atmosphere. For a burst of summertime energy to get you through the school break, go for energising orange wallpaper, or opt for green — the colour of nature — to remind yourself to enjoy being outside while you can.   

DIY indoor beach

Whether you’re at home or on holiday, we always associate the summer with days at the beach. So, this is a great theme to bring inside if you want to create an iconic summer room. Here are our favourite DIY summer decoration ideas to for a stylish beach theme in your home. Or even just an eye-catching, coastal focal point:

• Shadow boxes: buy a few of these and glue seashells you’ve found in the sand or ornamental sea animals onto the back so that they show through the window.
• Beach pebbles: take the kids to the seaside one day and fill up a bucket with pretty pebbles and stones that you can put in a clear glass vase.
• Starfish and fairy lights: buy starfish wall ornaments to hang on a wall in your home. Then, drape some fairy lights around them to create a starfish wall decor.
• Beach box: get some empty glass jars and fill them half way with sand. Scatter pebbles and shells you’ve collected inside for your own beach jar that you can place on the hearth or kitchen shelf. Why not buy some fish tank figurines, like treasure chests, to put in? You could even throw some pennies and 5p coins in as ‘treasure’.
• Coastal art: make a collage of your favourite beaches and seaside holidays. Put the perfect finishing touch on your beachy collage by gluing a few shells around the frame.

There are also plenty of cheap, good-quality decorative beach pieces available that you can use throughout your home, such as wooden pirate ship wheels, sailboat figurines and seaside-themed cushions.

Wallpaper patterns

If you want to make a proper summer room, the colour and pattern of your walls are going to be one of the biggest helpers for creating that summertime vibe.

Wood-effect wallpaper gives us an impression of boardwalks and beach houses, which fits in perfectly with our theme. Hang a full run of this wooden panel wallpaper throughout the entire room:

Or complement it by leaving one wall for this tropical palm tree mural:

This seashell motif wallpaper looks fantastic in bathrooms:

 

Or you could always go for simple and effective by hanging block colours of typically summertime colours throughout your home, such as yellow and orange, like below:

Dress your tables

Another top tip for the perfect summer room is table dressing. Rather than leaving your tables, shelves and other surfaces bare, fill them with cerise flowers, tangerine vases and tropical fruit bowls — anything bright and summery. We’ve also seen people use flowerpots to stand colourful paper windmills in, which looks great and reminds us of days playing outside during holidays.

Wind chimes and summer decorations

These are also fun summertime activities that even the kids can help you with, like making colourful garlands and bunting using multi-coloured tissue paper and string. Once you’re finished, you can drape your masterpiece around the conservatory or anywhere else in the house that gets lots of sunlight to show off the different colours. These are especially good for creating a relaxing, ‘summer street party’ vibe at family barbecues and get-togethers in the garden.

Alternatively — or as well as — you can make your own nautical-themed wind chime by tying together coloured stones, seashells and bits of driftwood.

Wooden floors

If you want to design a cool and bright summer room, wood flooring is ideal. Get the right shade and texture, and you can recreate a beach cabin right in your home — which sets the ideal atmosphere for relaxing on light summer nights with a drink. Plus, this floor will trap less heat than a carpet. However, you can always put down a thin rug (in one of the summery shades we talked about earlier) if you like.

Summery furniture

Rattan furniture is quintessentially summer. Brought to the UK from the Far East centuries ago, rattan tables and chairs are lightweight and fashionable — an ideal choice for summer rooms, like conservatories. Customise your rattan sofa with a yellow throw and colourful cushions, then sign off on the laid-back/beach house look by complementing your couch with a couple of old-fashioned wooden deck chairs with striped fabric seat. A great way of merging retro fashion with a beachy, summertime theme.

Mirror magic

To brighten up the place without going big on price, why not hang a few extra mirrors? This not only gives the illusion of a bigger and breezier room, but it also helps reflect natural light for a happier, sunnier atmosphere.

Summertime blues

With the longer days and added heat, you have to throw in extra effort to keep a summer room cool. If you’re redecorating for the season, consider a blue theme, similar to this blue and white striped wallpaper design from P&S International, to run through the entire room. Team your choice with white furniture — such as sofas, stools and side tables.

Blue essentially has a calming and cooling effect on the human mind, so it makes a welcoming retreat to return to after a day in the sun — and it has those suitable connections with seaside that also slots in with our summer room theme.

For bright colours to kick-start your summer decorations theme, check out our blue, green, orange, and yellow wallpaper designs.