· By CR Studio
Where Artists Go For It
The hallway is often the room we most underestimate. It's transitional by nature - somewhere you pass through rather than linger - which is exactly why so many artists have used it as a place to be bold. No sofa to consider, no dinner guests to please, just a wall and a decision. Here, we're looking at our own wallpaper doing exactly that in homes all over the world, alongside a handful of the most iconic corridors in art history - all evidence that the power of a well-curated, well-decorated hallway should never be overlooked.
Casa Balla, Rome
Giacomo Balla moved into this apartment in Rome's Prati district in 1929 with his wife and their two daughters, Luce and Elica - both painters in their own right - and the family spent the following decades turning it into a total Futurist environment, right down to the door handles. The long entrance hallway is the showpiece: ceiling and walls painted with interlocking amoeba-like forms in blues, greens and yellows, a run of abstract paintings mounted above head height, and a coat rack hung with one of Balla's own handmade Futurist suits. His daughters lived there until the 1990s and kept the apartment almost exactly as it was; it opened to the public in 2021.
Emma Ainscough's Hallway, London
Interior designer Emma Ainscough paired both colourways of our Lioness & Palms wallpaper - Midday and Midnight- alongside each other, creating a space that shifts from light to dark as you move through it. Adapted from a 1918 watercolour by C.F.A. Voysey in the V&A archive, the design was originally conceived to tell the story of a single day. Seeing both halves reunited in one space is wonderful.
Villa E-1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin
Eileen Gray designed E-1027 between 1926 and 1929 for herself and her partner Jean Badovici - every detail hers, down to the built-in furniture and the famous crumb-catching breakfast table. It was a masterclass in restraint: white walls, considered light, nothing superfluous. After Gray and Badovici separated, Le Corbusier – a frequent guest, later painted eight murals directly onto the walls without Gray's permission. Gray regarded the intervention as vandalism, a view many historians continue to debate today. The murals are still there today, restored alongside the house, which is now open to the public. Vandalism or not, we can appreciate that both the architecture and the murals are iconic, and we're sure both have inspired many.
Kate Hawkins' Hallway, London
CommonRoom founder Kate Hawkins chose Love Leaves, adapted from a previously unseen watercolour by William Kilburn, to line her own hallway. The painting was discovered in a sketchbook by Kilburn's descendant, Gabriel Sempill, offering a rare glimpse of a different side of the celebrated eighteenth-century designer, better known for his richly floral chintzes.
Printed using traditional surface-printing techniques, the wallpaper has the gentle irregularity of hand-block printing, giving each repeat subtle variation. Like the changing seasons that inspired it, the pattern feels both constant and alive - proof that a hallway deserves as much attention as the rooms beyond it.
Polina Raiko's house, Oleshky
Polina Raiko didn't pick up a paintbrush until she was 69, after a run of family tragedy that would have flattened most people. Instead, she used her pension to buy paint and, over the following years, covered her entire home - walls, ceilings, doors, hallways - in dense, joyful folk imagery: doves, flowers, animals, angels, all in blues, yellows and reds.
It became a genuine pilgrimage site for lovers of naïve art, a house that was itself the artwork. In June 2023, the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed during the Russian invasion, and the resulting flood submerged the house; by some estimates only 30–40% of the frescoes survived, mostly those closest to the ceiling. It's a heartbreaking loss and a reminder of how much of what we consider heritage is far more fragile than it looks.
Casa Dalí, Portlligat
Salvador Dalí bought a single fisherman's hut on this stretch of the Catalan coast in 1930 and spent the next four decades absorbing the neighbouring huts one by one, until he and Gala had created a rambling, labyrinthine home built entirely around instinct rather than plan. Dalí described it as "a real biological structure" - each new impulse in their lives earned its own room.
The result is a maze of narrow corridors, sudden level changes and dead ends, leading visitors past a taxidermied polar bear, a Mae West lips sofa and, at the foot of the staircase, a vast Japanese paper umbrella suspended overhead like something from one of his own paintings. Surreality wasn't reserved for the canvas here; it was the whole house.
Osborne & Hodge Hallway, Suffolk
For this staircase, interior design studio Osborne & Hodge used our Lucky Leaf wallpaper by Kate Hawkins to create a leafy canopy that accompanies you as you go up and down. Rather than treating the stairwell as a purely functional route between floors, the design transforms it into an immersive experience, wrapping the walls in foliage that encourages the eye to wander and creates the feeling of moving through the treetops.
Casa Barragán, Mexico City
Luis Barragán's own home, built in 1948, is often held as the model of architectural restraint - clean planes, careful light, almost nothing on the walls. Which is exactly why the hallway is so iconic.
Visitors enter through a dim, narrow passage of tinted yellow light before turning a corner into a sudden, saturated wall of pink. It's a single, theatrical gesture in an otherwise disciplined house, and it works because Barragán earned it through restraint everywhere else. He'd go on to use the same device - a dark corridor giving way to a shock of colour - throughout his later work, most famously at Casa Gilardi.
Casa Batlló, Barcelona
Commissioned by the textile magnate Josep Batlló in 1904, Antoni Gaudí used the opportunity to abandon conventionality almost entirely. The staircase is a perfect expression of it: a broad, flowing run of wood whose handrail evokes the spine of a great animal, widening and narrowing along its length to fit the natural curve of a hand. Everything in the house seems to follow some imagined skeleton beneath the surface, but the staircase - half sculpture, half functional object - is a work of art in itself.
Winding around that staircase is the house's other great hallway moment: a central light well, tiled from floor to ceiling in ceramic blue. Gaudí divided it into two shafts and graded the tiles deliberately - darkest at the top, near the skylight, growing paler as they descend - so that light is distributed evenly throughout the building, regardless of distance from the roof.
It's a genius solution to the problem of ventilation and daylight, disguised as decoration. Stand at the bottom of the stairwell and look up, and it feels less like a corridor than the bottom of the sea.
Farleys Farm House, East Sussex
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose bought Farley Farm in 1949 and spent the next thirty-five years filling it with work by the artists who came to stay - Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Leonora Carrington among them.
The house is a warren of narrow passages painted in bold, unapologetic colour, and the cobalt-blue hallway ties them all together: a cabinet of curiosities holding a muscle man Picasso sculpted from a champagne wire cage alongside a mummified rat and the family's everyday glassware, all treated with the same sense of wonder. It reads less like a corridor between rooms and more like a gallery that happens to be the route from one room to the next.
What connects all these spaces is a shared understanding that hallways deserve to be more than thoroughfares. Whether wrapped in wallpaper, painted in colour or filled with art, they become part of the experience of a home rather than simply the route through it.
Perhaps that's why so many artists and designers have treated them as places to be bold. The hallway may be the room we spend the least time in, but it is often the first impression a house makes - and the last before we leave it.
Explore our hallway-worthy wallpapers here.
Researched and written by Freya Marton.