The headboard commands attention in your bedroom. It is the first thing that catches your eye as you walk in, and it plays a decisive role in defining the room’s decorative personality. Whether or not your bed comes with a built-in headboard, the choices you make for the wall behind it matter a great deal.
Even a bare mattress or the simplest bed can be transformed by a creative, original headboard into a striking setting for rest and relaxation.
That is exactly why we have gathered ideas for “alternative” headboards that can show off even the plainest bed.
Use old doors and windows for a country, vintage look & feel
If you want a more “classic wood” effect, you can sand down old wooden windows or doors and either leave them in their natural colour or paint them in one or more colours that complement the room’s colour palette.
Alternatively, you can decoupage their surfaces or create compositions with fabric or paper.
Improvise with wooden compositions
Paint wooden surfaces, decoupage MDF, reuse old pallets, and make your own “signs”, adding your personal touch and style.
Use mirrors as a headboard
Using one or more mirrors as a headboard gives you a striking result and lets you enjoy the advantages mirrors bring to bedrooms, namely making the space look larger and brighter.
Hang fabrics from rails
Fabrics of every kind – patchwork, floral prints, old bedspreads, woven textiles (if yours is a traditional home) – can be used to create a simple, understated and attractive headboard.
Use shelves
Put a shelf above your bed and dress it with paintings, vases, candles, a collection of your own or any other decorative objects.
Set up old screens or room dividers
If you have a room divider you no longer use, you can repurpose it as an alternative headboard and achieve a striking effect.
Create a headboard on the wall with wallpaper
Design a “headboard-like” panel in whatever shape you prefer from a piece of wallpaper, and put it up on the wall behind your bed.
Compose a headboard from paintings and photographs
Create a gallery wall of paintings or photographs, organising them by theme, by size or by the design of their frames.
Improvise!
“Random”, imaginative ideas that can show off the wall behind your bed by creating the “illusion” of a headboard!
Text and editing: Natasa Lianopoulou
