Easy, Beautiful Home Addition - Wallpaper Border

Wallpaper Borders add a quick touch of southwest or western style to your rooms. The borders are great as a design element right next to the ceiling or used as a chair rail height. While living in heart of cowboy country, in Houston, Texas (before we moved to Albuquerque), we had teenagers still living at home.

Have you ever noticed how much your teenagers have to caress all the walls as they walk by? We had a hallway that lead from our great room to their bedrooms. I was constantly washing their dirty finger prints off my pristine white walls. We got the great idea to install a southwestern style wallpaper border right where their fingerprints used to end up. Afterwards the fingerprints didn't stick any more, problem solved!

Western or Southwest Style wallpaper borders add that hint of color and design to a bedroom, dining room or kitchen. You'll love it. Your friends will love it too!

Southwestern Design Wallpaper Borders Here

Western Design Wallpaper Borders Here

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Southwestern Painted Wall Color Is An Easy Decor Change

You don't have to live in Arizona or New Mexico to enjoy Southwestern style interior design. Every house can adapt to this casually-elegant style that draws its inspiration from nature and the Spanish and Pioneer settlers that populated the American Southwest in the 18th and 19th centuries. Southwestern style, as we know it today, evolved over time. It takes the colors and textures from the desert with the Mexican and Spanish additions of ironwork, textiles, and wooden carvings.

Southwestern style interior design follows the soft lines of traditional adobe houses and reflects the easy, relaxed Southwestern lifestyle. It's a simple -- and affordable -- style to achieve, if you pay attention to the details.

The colors of Southwestern design are the colors found in the American desert. Rich, rust terra cotta, soothing sand colors, sage and cactus greens, reddish rust, sienna and deep mahogany brown combine to form a relaxed, natural palette. Sometimes, the bright colors common to the Native American and Mexican cultures, such as bright red and deep azure blue are used as accent colors.

The textures of Southwestern style interior design also mirror those elements found in nature in the American Southwest. Natural clay tile, pine wooden structural beams and furniture, and woven grasses are all key elements in this design style.

You can find all of these colors at your paint store. Try to stay away from Navajo White as a background color. It's much better to use light browns and terracotta for large wall surfaces. Our adobe home here in Rio Rancho has most of the walls painted a deep adobe brown. It is really fantastic and blends very well with the natural wood accents and southwestern accents.

Many people will add a single accent wall in a room with a deep rich color of the southwest. Maybe colors like deep rust, plum, sage or cactus green or maybe deep rich yellow for a striking color. Whatever color you decide, be sure to test a 4'x4' area of a wall to see how that particular tint looks when dry.

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Indian Cliff Dwellings Near Santa Fe

Bandelier National Monument is one of our favorite places to take friends when they visit us in the southwest. It is a beautiful little know place hidden away in mountains just west of Santa Fe near the mountain town of Los Alamos. Los Alamos was originally the mountain fortress where the Atomic bomb was developed during WWII. Don't worry there is no residual left.

Bandelier will surprise you with its gorgeous mesas, sheer-walled canyons, and ancestral Pueblo dwellings. As you drive along high mesa ridges, you suddenly drop into Frijoles Canyon with a beautiful tree lined stream in the middle of massive multicolored rock walls. The area was inhabited by the Anasazi Indians (more information in next section) from the 1100s into the mid-1500s.

See a view of Frijoles Canyon

Trails to the nearby archeological sites begin near the visitor center. Along the paved Main Loop Trail you can explore kivas, the Tyuonyi pueblo ruins, cave rooms, the Long House ruin, petroglyphs, pictographs, and a ceremonial cave. Ladders are provided so you can actually climb into the original rooms of cliff dwellings along the trail. The path also leads by the Tyuonyi pueblo ruins, which are ruins of multilevel structures that once existed in the canyon.

The highlight is the ceremonial cave where visitors can find a restored kiva on a ledge 140 feet above canyon floor. This site is accessed by following an extension of the Main Loop Trail along the stream to the base of the ladders. The site is 140 feet up and visitors climb 4 wooden ladders of varying lengths to get to the cave. The signs caution that those who are not in good physical shape or have a fear of heights should not attempt the climb, but it is really not terribly strenuous for those in moderately good condition.

View the valley from the trail that leads into the cliff dwellings

You'll immerse yourself in the ancient culture as you climb up into caves that were once living rooms and bedrooms and peer out through the small openings and envision what it must have been like. It's also a great place to take children because they can run and climb in the rocks until they wear themselves out.

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