Home tour 18 June 2026
Inside a pattern-filled family home
When Lena and Jonas bought their 1960s terrace on the edge of Freiburg, every wall in the house was the same tired shade of magnolia. Four years and two children later, there is barely a room without pattern — and somehow the house feels calmer, not busier.
We spent a morning with the family to find out how they got from one sample book to a whole home, and what they would tell anyone hovering nervously over their first bold roll.
A hallway that sets the tone
The tour starts the moment the front door opens: a deep green botanical climbs the hallway from skirting to picture rail. "It was the scariest decision and the best one," Lena says. "You pass through a hallway, you don't sit in it — so it can take far more drama than you think."
The trick that holds it together is repetition. The same green reappears down the house — in a kitchen splashback, a lampshade, the spines of books — so the boldest room in the house quietly introduces everything that follows.
Pattern where you least expect it
The kitchen wears a small-scale geometric that reads almost as texture from across the room and only reveals its pattern up close. In the downstairs bathroom the family went the other way entirely: an oversized floral on every wall of the smallest room in the house.
"Small rooms are where you experiment," Jonas says. "It is one or two rolls. If you fall out of love with it, an afternoon fixes it — that is the whole point of non-woven."
The children chose their own walls
Upstairs, each child picked their own feature wall from a shortlist of three designs. Six-year-old Mila landed on a soft terracotta leaf print; her older brother chose a moody star chart that glows faintly at bedtime.
Letting the children decide did more than settle arguments. "They are proud of their rooms," Lena says. "They tidy them. Nobody warned us wallpaper could do that."
Calm is a choice, not an absence
The living room is the quietest space in the house — a warm textured plain in soft clay — and that is deliberate. After a house full of pattern, the room where the family gathers gives the eye somewhere to rest.
It is the lesson of the whole house: pattern everywhere does not mean noise everywhere. A shared palette, one scale-shift per room and one deliberate pause is all the system you need.
