5 ways to bring the industrial look to your home

What exactly is “the industrial look”? In a home, it’s what you’re left with once you’ve stripped away the more superfluous elements of your residential decor – leaving behind the likes of exposed beams, brickwork, metal and other construction elements. 

There’s something effortlessly cool about the industrial style, but you might remain unsure how to achieve it without gutting your home. Here are a few simple but effective things you can do to emulate this style while keeping your domestic interiors just as practical as before.   

Expose your home’s interior brickwork 

You don’t necessarily have to remove all of your home’s drywall if you aren’t feeling quite that adventurous. Instead, you could just add new brickwork – perhaps in the form of a focal wall or something more subtle, like a kitchen backsplash or fireplace surround composed of bricks.

Alternatively, you could cheat a little – as Ideal Home says that “some really realistic wallpapers” are available if you want to capture the brickwork look in a rather time-effective, hassle-free way.    

Add concrete furniture, shelving or accessories 

Concrete was commonly used for the floors and structural elements of 19th-century industrial factories due to the material’s strength, low cost and durability, as a Forbes article explains. 

So, inserting concrete elements into your domestic decor is surely a no-brainer – and it doesn’t have to be difficult, either. You could just add concrete accessories like candle holders and bedside lamps – and apply faux-effect wallpaper on walls you would like to see resemble concrete.  

Incorporate steel accessories and furnishings 

While your home probably doesn’t have the kind of steel columns, beams and trusses that once formed major parts of industrial factories and mills, you can still somewhat – ahem – “steel” the look by adding just a few steel flourishes to your abode. 

For example, you could online-order some industrial table legs in a raw steel finish before affixing these legs to existing tables in your residence. 

Repurpose pieces salvaged from old factories 

Yes, it might look a bit like a robot has vomited in your home – but combining various non-structural elements like gears, valves and mechanical tools with other design styles can work surprisingly well.

Perhaps you could place an old gear on its side and then put a piece of glass on top to create a side table, or leave some tools on display? There are many different possibilities – and these pieces can stay the course in your home just as long as they were originally designed to in factories. 

Adhere to a monochromatic colour scheme

As a Yahoo! Finance article advises: “The industrial style is not exactly known for vibrant pops of colour, so it’s probably a good idea to stick to a predominantly black and white colour palette.”

As a general rule, if a colour wouldn’t out of place in an early Hollywood film, it probably wouldn’t look jarring as part of industrial decor, either. For example, you could paint your walls in light grey and then somewhat offset those with darker grey rugs or skirting boards.