French Country Living Room – Combining the warm, rustic charm of a farmhouse with the elegance of traditional French design, French country decor is an ideal option if you want to create a stylish but inviting living room. While there are many elements that can bring the theme to life, choosing a wall treatment that fits the French country style is key. To capture the rugged look of a home in the French countryside, a textured finish is usually your best bet, but you can choose from several styles depending on your preferences.
French Country Living Room Decor
Venetian Plaster
Rough, textured walls are a common feature in French Country Living Room decor, and Venetian plaster can give your walls a warm, worn finish that fits the cozy, inviting vibe of the decor well. To keep with the French country theme, choose a warm shade for the plaster like a muted red or yellow. You should prep the walls with a tinted primer that matches the plaster before apply the plaster in a thin layer, covering small sections at a time. After the plaster dries, you should apply another layer of plaster using a crisscross motion to create visible texture on the walls. Allow the second layer to dry and apply a third layer of plaster, taking care to smooth it over your textured layer. Once the plaster is fully dry, you can use a coarse-grit sandpaper to sand the wall in an up-and-down motion. Follow with a finer-grit sandpaper to polish the plaster and you’ll end up with a striking finish for your walls that fits the French country theme to a tee.
Color Wash
You can also give your French Country Living Room walls a worn, weathered appearance that fits the French country style by using a color wash finish. Color washing provides a more subtle textured appearance than Venetian plaster and requires only paint and glaze. Start by painting your walls with a base coat in your chosen color. For a French country theme, red, gold, blue or green are all ideal options. Use the same paint to tint a glaze product from your local paint supply or home improvement store, and apply it with a brush in an X pattern. Make sure to work on small areas at a time, overlapping the X’s until all of the glaze on your brush is gone and fully blended into the wall. Cover the entire wall in the same manner. The glaze softens your base color to give it a rustic, weathered look that would fit right in a French farmhouse.
Faux Brick
Brick is another ideal wall material for a French Country Living Room because it provides a warm, rugged look that fits the style. While adding actual brick to your living room walls isn’t exactly practical, you can fake the look in several easy ways. Faux brick wallpaper provides the look and texture of genuine brick and is easy to hang with traditional wallpaper paste. If you’re not a fan of wallpaper, you can actually use paint to fake the look of brick for your living room walls. Apply a base coat of cream or beige paint, which will mimic the look of mortar once the brick pattern is added. After the base coat dries, use painter’s tape to create a grid for the brick pattern. To get the most realistic texture, use a sponge brush to apply layers of brown and red paint to each rectangle in the grid. When you remove the painter’s tape, the wall will resemble a mortared brick surface that adds to rustic charm of your living room’s French country decor.
Toile Wallpaper
If you prefer a more elegant take on the French country style for your living room, wallpaper with a traditional toile pattern is your best bet. Toile typically refers to a fabric found in French country decor featuring a repeating pattern that depicts pastoral scenes. Traditional toile usually has a white or cream background with the scenes captured in black, red or blue. For a French country living room, blue or red toile wallpaper work especially well. If you find the toile pattern too busy to use on all your walls, consider using the paper on a single wall to create a striking focal point in your living room.