If you're going to wallpaper one room in your house with something truly special, let it be the powder room — and let it be chinoiserie. The combination is one of interior design's most reliable wins. Guests step in, close the door, and suddenly they're surrounded by a hand-drawn garden of exotic birds and flowering branches. It's unexpected, it's memorable, and it makes a three-by-five-foot room feel like the most interesting space in the house.
Chinoiserie in bathrooms works because the patterns thrive in small, enclosed spaces. The intricate details — each brushstroke, each feather, each leaf — are viewed from inches away, not across a room. The intimacy of a bathroom is exactly the viewing distance chinoiserie was designed for. And the typical bathroom palette of white porcelain and chrome fixtures provides a clean backdrop that lets the pattern's richness take center stage.
For powder rooms, any of our three materials works. For full bathrooms with showers, go with pre-pasted or traditional for moisture durability. A deep blue or emerald chinoiserie in a windowless powder room, lit by a pair of brass sconces, is one of those design choices that punches so far above its cost that it feels like getting away with something.
