Having a Moment

Stylish People Are Decorating With Plates on the Wall—and We’re Here for It

Design insiders dish on the timeless—and often economical—decorating decision
A dining room wall covered in 19th century dishes
Design lovers around the world are dusting off their finest china and hanging it on the walls. Here, in Veere Grenney’s Tangier getaway, a circa-1815 Royal Worcester dinner service creates serious impact in the dining room.Photographed by Simon Upton

All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Liken it to a storied artwork or sculpture: Dishware is developing a renewed kind of cultural cachet as design aficionados are decorating with plates on the wall. Style icons including Moda Operandi cofounder Lauren Santo Domingo, textile maven Carolina Irving, and fashion journalist turned Milanese print purveyor J.J. Martin are full-on obsessed with their dishes, it seems. Instagram feeds across the decorosphere are filled with tablescapes and place settings, and the market category has seen newcomers such as Social Studies offering fanciful dishware for rent. Suddenly, china is no longer something registered for before a wedding or reluctantly inherited from Granny—it has become an extension of an outfit, part of one’s personal style. 

But what to do with all those plates when cabinet space begins to run low? Tabletop-loving tastemakers have always known the answer: Take those dishes out of the cabinets and display them on the walls, of course!

The cozy eating nook in Dior Maison artistic director Cordelia de Castellane’s French country house is layered with Simrane fabrics and an assortment of decorative plates. 

Matthieu Salvaing

“I hate the idea of beautiful plates [being languorously] unused or unseen in a cupboard,” says stylist, editor, and self-professed tableware maniac Mieke ten Have, who fancies decorating with plates on the wall and within bookshelves in nearly every room of her barn in upstate New York. “A plate is a perfect little canvas and a harmonious shape.”

Ten Have recommends grouping them by color or collection type. She hung a vestibule with blues: 18th-century Delft chargers and platters, French blue and white faïence, and pale blue English transferware. Elsewhere, she mounted a collection of rare Creil et Montereau faux-bois puce cameau plates all together on shelves. “I love the dimension and texture it adds to a wall,” she says. “And there’s something wonderfully harmonious about a collection of circles.”

Designer Anouska Hempel hangs wall plates in a historic English manor.

Photo: Tim Beddow

Designer Anouska Hempel took a similar—and meticulously hung—approach in an historic manor in the English countryside. Within the breakfast room, a collection of near-identical porcelain plates is displayed over the Georgian mantle. The set is one of many antique collections arranged within the storied interior.

Milan-based printoholic J.J. Martin, whose cult line of patterned dresses evolved into tableware in 2017, took a rather opposite approach in the kitchen of her Milan flat. “l wanted it to look as if they were literally thrown on the wall and stuck there,” she says of the brilliantly clashing display she created with castoffs and color trials saved from when she was developing her La Double J tableware line. (In reality, she laid everything out on the floor first to find a grouping that worked and hired her handyman to help with installation.) 

“For those of us who don’t have unlimited budgets or unlimited art collections, it’s fun to get creative with how you decorate the walls,” says Martin, who’s known for her signature pattern punch. “This stuff is meant to be enjoyed, ogled, and eaten visually.”

In her Milan flat, J.J. Martin arranged leftover La DoubleJ plates—castoffs and color trials from the product development phase—in a casual grouping that’s bursting from the wall with energy. 

Matthieu Salvaing

Naturally, the home’s culinary hubs (kitchen, dining room, breakfast nook) are an intuitive landing place for hanging plates on the wall. Take AD100 talent Giancarlo Valle’s color-drenched dining room within a client’s Manhattan townhouse, where he covers the dining room hearth with plates by Stephen Bird. The varying patterns provide plenty of visual intrigue, but the blue and green palette brings some consistency to the budding collection. 

In his own kitchen in Sussex, AD100 designer Martin Brudnizki complements the culinary space with a column of printed plates (previously owned by decorating doyenne Nancy Lancaster) lining a bare wall. Not only do the dishes pair nicely with the room’s food-focused objective, but they also integrate the marigold and Kelly green color palette that Brudnizki uses to coat the kitchen walls and cabinets, respectively.

Plates by Stephen Bird decorate the tiled hearth in a Manhattan dining room by Giancarlo Valle.

Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson

A column of antique wall plates fits cohesively with the Kelly green kitchen cabinets in a Martin Brudnizki–designed kitchen.

Henry Bourne

Though this alternative wall decor feels fresh, hanging plates on the wall is nothing new. In 1972, The New York Times declared in a headline “Decorative Plates—Not Fine Art, But They’re Good As Gold,” covering the fad of collectible dishware by the likes of Norman Rockwell, Charles Schulz, Salvador Dalí, and Andrew Wyeth. (Companies like Prospect NY and Artware Editions carry that torch today with their artist-designed dishware.) 

But even so, dish delirium stretches back long before that. “In many European castles, special rooms were created to display porcelain and ceramic dishes,” points out Carolina Irving, who hung her Iznik plates—too delicate for everyday use—in a row to create a cornice of sorts in her Portugal kitchen. AD100 designer Frank de Biasi did something similar in his own Tangier dining room

“We had a space just under the crown which was crying out for adornment,” de Biasi recalls. “So we painted a band of bright green and hung the plates on that. It created a bit of architecture around the room and made for some fetching eye candy.” As for the other, lower-hanging plates around the house, he and husband Gene Meyer regularly grab them straight from the wall when entertaining.

AD100 designer Frank de Biasi hung a line of plates just below the crown molding in his own Tangier dining room

Matthieu Salvaing

Designer Tino Zervudachi creates a cozy breakfast nook decorated with a set of Iznik plates inherited by the client.

Richard Powers

Fortunately, the burgeoning wall plate trend can look divine even without a designated display room. When treated as though a framed photo or conversation-starting artwork, plates can be a suitable addition to any room with bare walls. In the dining room of a 17th-century château in France’s Loire Valley, designer Tino Zervudachi filled an alcove with Iznik plates that were collected by the homeowner’s grandmother. When paired with a snug banquette, the plate-adorned alcove becomes a laid-back, cozy alternative to the room’s more formal dining area. 

Designer Mandy Cheng covered an empty wall in Emmy Raver-Lampman and Daveed Diggs’s Los Angeles home with woven baskets.

Yoshihiro Makino

The concept doesn’t stop at plates: Any eye-catching tableware works wonders on a wall. Take, for example, when Mandy Cheng spotted a small stack of unused baskets in a room of actress Emmy Raver-Lampman and actor Daveed Diggs’s Los Angeles home. “I was immediately drawn to the colors and textures and held one up to the wall,” recalls Cheng, who fastened the woven bowls to the walls with small brass finish nails so they can be easily moved around. “Emmy’s eyes absolutely lit up.”

Shop the Style

Image may contain: Frisbee, Toy, and Tape

8-inch Adhesive Plate Hangers

Image may contain: Logo, Symbol, and Trademark

Lenox LX Remix 4-Piece Tidbit Plate Set

Marble-effect Earthenware Plates, Set of 4 by Henry Holland Studio

Green and White Mixed Pattern Dinner Plates, Set of 10 by Casa Nuno

Pomegranate Dinner Plate by Carolina Irving and Daughters

Dancing Accent Plate by Sheila Bridges

Ceramic Dessert Plates, Set of 6 by Esta Ceramiche for Moda Domus

3-Piece Large Platter Variety Set Vandvid Ceramics by Niels Refsgaard for Dansk

Image may contain: Shower Faucet

Azizi Life Boutique Diversiform Woven Bowls

Vintage Aerobleu Jazz China Dessert/Salad Plates, Set of 7 by Sasaki

Palio Small Plate, Set of 4

Image may contain: Drawing, Art, Doodle, Pattern, and Rug

Set of two 18kt-gilded porcelain dessert plates by La DoubleJ