How to style with wool throw blankets

With a little imagination, wool blankets make one of the best interior design accessories, allowing you the freedom to experiment and style with a variety of colour accents, patterns and textures while limiting your risk of making hasty and potentially expensive mistakes.

Redesigning an interior, especially if it’s one you’ve lived with for a long time, can be at the same time an exhilarating and stressful experience, followed by potentially expensive hangover if you get it wrong. Should I replace everything at once – risky – or gradually move from one design to another – perhaps a more comfortable option, but which runs the risk of being too conservative and falling short of your initial goals.

Unless you’ve enlisted the help of a professional interior designer, you may well be erring more on the side of continual evolution, attempting to repurpose high value items like sofas and other furniture while changing the overall colour palette using paints, rugs and other, easier to change, accessories.

Wool blankets and throws have the potential to create impact in several ways: adding colour accents, texture, pattern, quality and warmth.

Wool throws to style a sofa

Sofas are one of those high value items that people invest a lot of time choosing and money buying, often on seemingly cheap, but lengthy finance deals. Most of us have probably been there at one stage or other during our lives, especially when starting out.

Green wool herringbone blanket being used to style a sofa

Fortunately, by carefully choosing a wool throw blanket in the right colour and pattern to match your overall design scheme, throws can make a huge impact on a tired looking sofa. Whether they are folded up neatly and draped over an armrest or opened up to their full extent and laid over the seat cushions, a good quality wool throw will go a long way towards restoring an old sofa, covering threadbare cushions or drawing the eye away from faded material.

Style idea using a navy wool herringbone blanket to style an old white sofa

These images demonstrate a few ideas we’ve used to makeover our old white sofa. More than ten years old, our sofa is still ludicrously comfortable, but over the years and several machine washes has started to take on more of an off-white colour, not helped by several blemishes and stains. The fabric is also threadbare in places, especially around the armrests and in the middle of the seat cushions.

Throw blankets used to style chairs

Style idea using a terracotta wool herringbone blanket draped over the back of a wooden chair

While blankets can be folded up or thrown over armchairs in much the same way as on sofas, an often-overlooked trick is to fold up and place wool blankets over seats in a bedroom, conservatory or study – well, anywhere where there is a corner for a chair!

Style idea using an orange wool herringbone blanket thrown over a conservatory chair

In fact, this is fabulous way of adding a colour accent to a dark or sparse corner of a room. In reality, there is an almost infinite number of ways to fold up or throw a blanket over the back of a chair; however, there will be one or two ways that work best in your space, so over to you to experiment:)

Blanket folded up on a coffee table

Style idea using a grey wool throw folded up on a coffee table

Another fantastic way of adding a colour accent or texture to your room. Fold your wool blanket up on a coffee table. This informal technique will also encourage visitors or family members to actually use the blanket, especially if it’s in a large room that is susceptible to fluctuation in temperatures, like a conservatory. It doesn’t have to be a coffee table; you could use a wooden crate or box placed in a corner of the room. The options are only really limited by the depth of your imagination. Obviously, adjust the number of folds to the size of the space.

Style idea using a navy and grey check wool blankets folded up on a box

Use wool blanket throws to style a bed

There are literally hundreds of ways a wool blanket can be used to style a bed. In this image, we’ve demonstrated one simple but effective way of using one of the larger herringbone blankets in our range to style the end of a double bed. Simply folded in half, the blanket is stretched across the bottom of the bed. If you have larger blankets, these can be stretched out to cover more of the bed. Smaller throws can be folded up neatly and draped over one side. Whichever method you prefer, this is a great way of introducing strong colour accents to a bedroom. Also, when the weather cools, a good quality wool blanket will feel reassuringly warm and comfortable. They aren’t called comfort blankets for nothing:)

Style idea using a sky blue wool herringbone blanket covering the bottom of a double bed

Ultimately, the approach you decide to take with your interior design project will be decided by your personality and external factors, most likely beyond your control. If you do decide to use wool throw blankets, remember that you will be investing in a quality natural product that has the potential to last a lifetime and endure many iterations of your design ideas.

If you are looking for more inspiration, you may want to read through some of our interior design articles:

We hope you've enjoyed reading our blog. Let us know in the comments below if you've any great ideas for using wool blanket throws - we'd love to hear from you!