Chalkboard paint is an inventive way to bring a little fun (and maybe even some childish mischief!) to your interior design. Depending on how you decide to use the chalkboard effect, there’s an entire range of interesting visualisations that you can create to suit your home design. From classy chic to shabby chic, you’re only limited by your imagination…

How to incorporate chalkboards into your home design

Without looking shabby and cheap!

Chalkboards can look especially effective in the kitchen, as this is typically the area that people leave notes and messages hanging on cork boards and fridges. You can leave temporary messages, reminders, schedules and calendars for the whole family. Or even recipes and grocery lists like in the photographs above.

The installment of a chalkboard as part of your kitchen or dining room design doesn’t necessitate ever-changing messages and calendars though. You can easily incorporate a more themed chalkboard wall into the overall design of your kitchen or dining room. Like the motivational messages and empty “hanging frames” or the whimsical breakfast-related quote from Alice in Wonderland as pictured above. You can choose for certain aspects of the chalkboard to be permanent, while still leaving space for any doodles or messages you may want to add later.

Clean white kitchen and dining room furniture, like the Holmes High Gloss kitchen set pictured above, look fantastically dramatic when contrasted against the matte black surface of the chalkboard.

Or for a more playful contrast, brightly coloured furniture (like the Nikita kitchen set below) also work very well if your use of the chalkboard suits a more colourful, playful theme.

Though the above examples of complementary furniture matches for chalkboard walls seem to favour more modern approaches to home design, chalkboard paint also seems to be quite popularly paired with pine wood furniture and decor for more of a rustic cottage feel. Chalkboards coupled with shabby chic style furniture couple in particular seems to be a popular combination.

Chalkboard walls for children’s bedrooms

Naturally, as you can imagine, children’s rooms are a popular space to implement a chalkboard area, as they are free to create and design their own space using their own imagination. But care has to be taken not to overwhelm the children’s room with an excessive amount of black. But rooms with a chalkboard wall can easily be brightened up when populated with other colourful objects that you would expect to be in a children’s room anyway, such as brightly coloured toys, furniture and other decor. The black chalkboard surface can easily be brightened up with pastel coloured children’s furniture, such as the Magic Garden kids furniture range or the Mercury Pink and White Sleep Station pictured below.

Alternatively, to complement the chalkboard colour, you can match it with other similarly coloured furniture such as the Ashen grey pine bunk bed in the image below. However, other aspects of the room will need to contrast with the darkness of the furniture and chalkboard to keep the room looking suitable for children’s play.

The use of chalkboard paint in the home allows for an enormous amount of originality in your interior design, and just because it’s black doesn’t mean that it’s going to gloom and doom your room!

Check out our post on Inspiration for Using Black in Interior Design for ideas on how to match a black chalkboard with your home furniture!

Images sourced from: grahamyelton.com, houseobsession.wordpress.com, franceshunt.co.uk, idesignarch.com, imgur.com, lifethrualens.net, 6thstreetdesignschool.blogspot.ca, decopeques.com