Using Warm Metallic Textures in Your Home
Metallic accents seem to be forever popular, and for good reason. Incorporating brass or copper into your home design adds some rich color, without it feeling too flashy or opulent. Here are some ways that you can add metallic accents to your home design.
A great way to incorporate warm metallic accents into your home is lightshades. If you have a very large, high ceilinged open plan room you could use large metal dome lightshades. Warm copper lightshades especially can make a large space like this feel more homely. In a smaller room you could try a smaller, stylistically shaped lightshade, which can make a wonderful center piece for a small room. Warm metallic lightshades will also give the light coming from them a rich metallic tint.
If you have a warm wooden bench top, a warm metallic fixture will compliment it very well, particularly a brass one. Warm metallic accents and warm woods complement each other very well, and with a lot of people moving towards warm wooden bench tops, a brass fixture is a great way to incorporate a metallic accent into your kitchen.
Copper kettles are another popular way of adding copper into the kitchen – they look wonderful, and what’s more, copper is an excellent heat conductor, so it makes great kettles.
A much more subtle way to use metallic accents is in small things like cutlery. Stainless steel may be the cutlery standard, but using copper or brass will look great when they’re set at the table. If you use a simple white table cloth, warm metallic cutlery can add some rich color to the table, or if you have a wooden table those will of course look great – warm wood and warm metal are as great a match here as everywhere else. Although cutlery will usually spend most of its time in a drawer, it’ll still look great when you bring it out for dinner parties, or you could keep it out in a jar or something of the like on your bench top.
Copper flashing (very thin sheets of copper metal) are a relatively inexpensive way to incorporate very large amounts of copper into a room. It can be used to cover furniture such as cupboards, creating a beautiful centerpiece from a potentially very inexpensive piece of furniture. You could also use copper flashing on something such as the back of a kitchen island, which would again complement a warm wooden bench top very nicely.
You could also use a metallic room partition/divider, which you could make by covering a partition in flashing. Room dividers are great for breaking up large open spaces, and one made from copper or brass is another great way to incorporate a large amount of a warm metal into a space. This one would work particularly well in large spaces, and is another way to make these spaces feel more homely, as you’re dividing it into smaller spaces, and making it feel warmer at the same time.
If you want your house to really stick out from the rest, you could use copper siding. It can obviously be expensive, but copper siding does last two to three hundred years, and will make your house look really quite spectacular. You could use it just on your roof, which would look especially good on a warm wooden house, or you could go all out and do the whole thing, walls and roof. Or you could of course find a balance in between – there are plenty of ways to go about it.
If you want to add a smaller accent than covering your entire house in copper to the exterior, you could use a warm metallic letter box. You can get beautiful copper, brass, or copper and brass letterboxes, either intricately patterned, or in more simple designs. Letterboxes are an easy way to add a small accent to the front of your house.
There are of course many, many more ways you can use warm metallic accents. You can use them for just about anything – from brass range hoods to copper chairs. Metallic accents can be used in any kind of space – they contrast simple modern spaces well, and they complement more traditional spaces equally well. So if you’re looking for a way to add something more to your space, whatever it might be, try incorporating some copper or brass, whether it’s just a little bit like a kettle or cutlery, a bit more like a light fixture or tap, or by going all out and covering furniture or your entire house in copper.
