Ombré & Gradient Wallpaper: Which Way Should It Run?

A graduated design holds one colour at one end of the wall and releases it at the other. Nothing repeats, nothing draws a line, and yet a gradient changes the proportions of a room more decisively than almost any pattern — because the eye reads depth of colour as distance.

It is also the format most often ordered incorrectly, for one reason: you have to decide which way the gradient runs before you buy, and you cannot change your mind once the panels are printed.

Which way the graduation runs

This is the whole decision, and it is worth standing in the room before you make it.

• Deep at the base, pale at the top settles the room. The weight sits at floor level where furniture already is, and the wall appears to lift away above it, which reads as more ceiling height than you have. Sediment in blue does this — the navy pools low and dissolves upward into almost-white.
• Deep at the top, pale at the base encloses the room. It draws the ceiling down and makes a large or cold space feel held. Stratum in teal works this way, with the colour strongest overhead.
• Graduated side to side is the least common and the most useful in a long room, because it gives you somewhere for the eye to travel. It suits a hallway better than a vertical gradient does.
• Banded rather than smooth sits between a gradient and a pattern. Sandscape and Seascape move through painterly horizontal strokes rather than a seamless fade, which keeps some texture in the wall.

Match the graduation to your ceiling

A gradient is designed around a drop height. Most of the graduated murals we carry are 3.35 m panels, which is generous for an Australian ceiling at 2.4 to 2.7 m — you will be trimming from one end, and which end you trim decides what the room gets.

Trim from the top and you lose the palest part of a base-weighted design, which flattens the lift. Trim from the bottom and you keep the full fade but lose the darkest anchor. Neither is wrong, but decide it deliberately rather than discovering it on the day. Our measuring guide covers how to record your real drop height, which is rarely the same at both ends of a wall.

The graduated designs to look at

• Sediment — layered watercolour strata, pale at the top through to a deep saturated base. The most architectural of the group.
• Stratum — a smooth vertical fade printed on grasscloth, so you get a graduated colour and a natural texture at once. Note the narrower 0.87 m drop, which means more panels across a wall.
• Sandscape — cool blue-grey at the top warming down to sand, in painterly bands rather than a smooth fade.
• Seascape — cream through to deep blue in horizontal strokes. Reads as water without being literal about it.
• Desertscape — the same banded treatment in green and grey, drier and more mineral in feeling.
• Wash — the softest of them, closer to a tonal drift than a true gradient, for a room that wants almost nothing.

All of these sit in the Emma Hayes collection, and there is a companion guide to painted and watercolour designs if you want the wider view.

Hanging a gradient

A graduated mural has a fixed panel order, and unlike a repeating paper the drops are not interchangeable — panel two will not sit where panel three should. Unroll and label everything before any paste goes near a wall, then hang in the maker's sequence.

Two things matter more than usual. Butt joins want to be genuinely tight, because a gradient gives the eye an uninterrupted field in which a 1 mm gap is visible from across the room. And the wall wants to be properly prepared, since a smooth fade will show a patched repair that a busy pattern would swallow. Our mural hanging guide and wall preparation guide cover both, and tricky spots deals with what to do when a gradient meets a corner.

Ordering ombre wallpaper from outside Australia

We ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand as well as within Australia. The word is spelled ombre or ombré depending where you are; the designs are the same.

• United States, Canada, UK and Europe: standard shipping A$180, arriving three to four weeks after dispatch. Express A$280, about ten business days. Samples A$35.
• New Zealand: standard shipping A$100, samples A$18.
• Australia: standard shipping A$50, samples A$5.

Prices display in your own currency and shipping is converted at checkout. Import duties and taxes are the recipient's responsibility. Our refund policy sets out the return terms for each country.

Deciding which way the gradient should run? Order a $10 sample and hold it against the wall both ways up, or email mary@wallpapertrader.com with your ceiling height and we will tell you how the panels will fall.