Victorian Home Design Is In—Here Are The Best 6 Tips For Trying It In Your Space (2024)

FAQs

How to make your home look Victorian? ›

The Victorians favored a rich, jewel-tone color palette for their homes. Browns, maroons, deep reds, and dark greens and blues conjured a sense of abundance, status, and wealth. For a modern spin, contrast these intense hues with lighter shades for a more balanced look.

Victorian interior design can be characterized by its unique ornamentation. Decorative wallpapers, tapestries, ornate rugs, curved furniture, and vibrant colors are all representative of the era.

“Recognizable characteristics are steep, tiled roofs, painted brick, bay windows, and asymmetrical design,” Dadswell says. “Wooden floorboards, plaster cornicing, sweeping staircases, wooden sash windows, and tiled entrance hallways would have been incorporated into most Victorian homes.”

Darker & highly saturated colors are some of the most popular and most traditional with Victorian-style homes. Traditionally quite dark, olives, browns, greens, dark reds and maroon were all quite common.

For the walls, simple vertical or metro tiles are a popular choice for this Victorian bathroom style, particularly green tiles, white tiles or dark blue tiles in glossy finishes. To recreate Victorian bathroom tiling, opt for a half-tiled wall with a complimentary tile trim for an authentic look.

Old Louisville in Kentucky has the highest concentration of restored Victorian homes in the US. Originally called the Southern Extension, Old Louisville was built in the 1870s as a suburb, which was 48 city blocks long and filled with Victorian mansions.

Victorian style homes are known for their ornate, carefully crafted designs, with unique elements such as steeply pitched roofs, elaborate trim, conical towers, bay windows, wrap-around porches with intricate woodworking, and decorative gables.

These homes often have 2-3 stories, with the living spaces, kitchens, and study rooms typically residing on the bottom floor while the bedrooms typically reside on the upper levels. Another notable and grand aspect of these homes is the presence of large, extravagant staircases.

The Victorians were huge fans of using lots of different textures. Try layering cushions with lace, velvet and brocade covers, trimming curtains or blinds with lace, adding sumptuous window treatments or festoon blinds, and using lace or delicately crocheted table and tray cloths.

Why were Victorian interiors so dark? ›

At first they did use dark colors on the walls imitating the castles and palaces from centuries earlier. They compensated for this using brighter colored tapestries and many candled sconces and candelabras'.

During the Victorian era, traditional palettes were made up of darker colours. A typical Victorian interior might include deep red shades like maroon and burgundy, while chestnut brown and moody dark grey were also common. Dark green, deep chocolate browns and dark blue were also design staples of the Victorian era.

Victorian-style homes became popular during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and are characterized by Gothic influences and intricately designed woodwork. These homes often have pitched roofs, wraparound front porches, cylindrical turrets, and roof towers.

The houses usually have two to three stories with steep, gabled roofs and round towers. On the exterior, there are towers, turrets, and dormers, forming complex roof lines as architects sought to create designs that would pull the eye to the top of the house.

Because more is more with modern Victorian interiors, textures and patterns will add so much to your space. Popular textures are fringed fabrics, velvets, marble, tufting and wood. Patterns such as plaids, stripes, florals and dasasks are used often on walls, upholstery and curtains.