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Beyond Wallpaper: 3-D Wall Treatments That Transform a Room

Not everyone was cheered by Benjamin Moore’s 2016 color of the year: the decidedly undramatic Simply White OC-117. And even Schumacher’s fiery Chiang Mai Dragon wallpaper leaves some people unmoved. For those who want more amplitude from their two-dimensional surfaces, 3-D wall coverings are literally shaping up as the answer. No silly glasses required.

Options are multiplying, from glass-beaded paper to sculpted-metal and wood panels, making mere textures like grass cloth seem tame. “You can do wallpaper and murals, but nothing is like the touch and texture of 3-D,” said Chicago designer Janet Shiff.

In the past, you had to be either a pharaoh selecting reliefs for his tomb walls or the patron of an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed nearly every surface in a home, to enjoy creatively textured walls. Even recently, such treatments had to be commissioned at painful expense through a professional.

For example, one Manhattanite recently paid $10,000 to have an interior designer install a one-of-a-kind panel that evokes the work of sculptor Louise Nevelson in a foyer. But similarly geometric aggregations of wood by Texas company Peter Glassford can be purchased in a variety of finishes for $30 a square foot. Though you’ll need a pro to put up such panels, you can buy them directly.

Dimensional walls can warm up a room that feels too austere and untouchable, said Chicago designer Tom Segal. In a formal dining room furnished with a mix of art deco and modern furniture, Mr. Segal added hirsute homeyness, covering inset panels with Kyle Bunting’s paper-backed strips of silvery hair-on cowhide, pictured below.

Grace E. Rosenstein, a designer who recently moved from Chicago to New York, with its plethora of cookie-cutter apartments, finds 3-D wall coverings “add dimension and interest to a room lacking architectural detail.” Taken by the grid of raised metallic dots in Phillip Jeffries’s Rivets line of wallpapers, Ms. Rosenstein chose Copper on Elephant Manila Hemp to add charisma to a humdrum entry of a pied-à-terre in a renovated prewar building. She used the wall covering’s metal details as a jumping off point, adding other reflective elements—a bronze hexagonal lantern and a silver-gilt mirror—to animate the room.

For a shingle-style home in Southampton, N.Y, designer Young Huh eschewed the bead board and wainscoting typical of the area’s houses, glamming up a living room by installing a black-and-gold velvet sofa and midcentury Robsjohn-Gibbings arm chairs. But even furnishings with such moxie couldn’t make up for the unremarkable walls, home to a large photo of Keith Richards. So Ms. Huh covered the lifeless surfaces with Bedazzled Leaf by Maya Romanoff, a flexible wall covering accented with strokes of gold leaf and covered with tiny glass beads (starting at $206 per yard). “Seeing it in my living space every day makes me feel special,” said her client, Rose Caiola.

If cowhide and glass-on-gold are too outré for your industrial tastes, try Alpha Workshops Teodorico plaster with a concrete finish, which can be troweled on or applied in panels ($23 a square foot). You control the measure of mica flakes that create the subtle sparkle. The contrast of glitter and grit appeals to New York designer Jamie Drake, who is installing it in a Park Avenue apartment renovation.

At the high end of this made-to-order world are glazed-ceramic tiles by ceramist Pamela Sunday, which fall into “the area of the Venn diagram that includes both art and design,” said Los Angeles designer Oliver Furth. Mr. Furth wanted to add architectural heft to a 6-by-10-foot wall that surrounds a fireplace in a redesign of a Bel Air, Calif., home. Ms. Sunday’s individually sculpted rectangular and square tiles ($1,125 a square foot from New York’s Studio Van den Akker) juxtapose intaglio and relief; the effect looks like the face of the moon crossed with an early-1970s London boutique.

Remarkably affordable 3-D options exist as well. Ms. Shiff likes the Dimension Walls from MDC—deeply textured, thermoplastic 4-by-8-foot panels available in an array of patterns, from Honeycomb to Bamboo. “The coolest thing,” said Ms. Shiff, “is that they can be painted any color.” With the panels starting at $10 a square foot, even suburban finished basements can be chic. “The days of just paneling are finished,” she said.

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