Brutalist Wallpaper For Your Concrete Jungle Apartment

Love it or hate it, Brutalist architecture makes up a substantial part of New York City. Now, you can bring a little bit of that concrete aesthetic inside the home, too.

Between Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to Columbia University’sJerome Greene Hall building, there is quite a range in what constitutes “good” and “really bad” Brutalism in New York. While some critics claim the architectural style is cold, stark, and impersonal, there is something vaguely calming and almost abstract about these new wallpaper designs from Murals Wallpaper. They’re perfect for small spaces too, as most of the textured, repetitive designs add a sense of scale and depth to the room.

The new Concrete Effect wallpaper line takes minimalism up a notch, but the dramatic effect is actually anything but minimal. The Cracked Concrete Textures wallpaper, for instance, gives the illusion of—you guessed it—a textured concrete wall, but it feels dynamic and fresh. It’s easy to imagine the wallpaper adding a new sense of depth to a room, rather than closing it in like a plain, dark-colored wallpaper might.

Or you could bring a little bit of the Big Smoke into your Brooklyn domain with the London High-Rise Wallpaper. With so many London transplants living in New York City, this Brutalist mural may actually serve as a source of comfort, despite all the heavy glass and concrete. One a single accent wall can offer a sense of scale within a room with its repetitious pattern.

There’s also the Metro wallpaper option, which features the interior dome of Harry Weese’s iconic design for the Washington D.C. metro station at L’enfant Plaza. The metro station design even won AIA’s 25 Year Award for Architecture in 2014. The curvature of the dome gives the illusion of a canopy and is ideal if you want to add a sense of depth to your room.

If the black, white, and grey patterns are a bit too bland for your aesthetic, they also offer colored concrete designs. Though not distinctly “brutalist,” the Rustic Concrete wallpaper is a subtly textured blend of the brutalist (concrete) aesthetic and millennial pink trend.

Each wallpaper mural starts at $35 per squared meter and can be found here.

For more trendy wallpaper designs for your New York City apartment, check out our exclusive video with Brooklyn’s one and only Flavor Paper.

About the author

Amber C. Snider

Home & Design Editor

Amber was born in Washington, D.C. and relocated to NYC in 2007. She received an M.A. degree in Liberal Studies: Women's Studies, Gender, and Sexuality from CUNY's Graduate Center and University, and an honors B.A. in English from The City College of New York. Before coming to Culture Trip, she was the executive editor for Metropolitan Magazine, a boutique luxury lifestyle and arts publication, as well as the editor for ResidencyNY Magazine. In 2015, she also started her own company, ACS Media Services, and has over 8+ years experience as a writer/editor in the NYC area. As one of the original employees in Culture Trip’s New York City office, Amber focuses on three verticals: Design, Architecture, and Home and Interiors, exploring how creativity and design influences our contemporary social landscape. She lives in Brooklyn with her typewriter.