Fireplace Decorating Ideas

Keep your year-round mantel décor simple yet stylish with these ideas for a fireplace mantel. Arrange favorite pieces — such as artwork, lanterns, small mirrors, tapestries, palm fronds in a vase, house plants or small artificial plants — in layers. Instead of lining up objects in a single row, stagger items of different heights and widths in front of each other. This overlapping creates depth, which is key to an attractive display.

Though a fireplace mantel is a great place to display small items, it helps to anchor the arrangement with at least one large piece, such as a lantern or framed picture. This dominant element in your fireplace mantel décor attracts the eye and stretches the scale, providing visual oomph to balance the smaller items. If there’s not room on the mantel for a large item, lean it or hang it on the wall behind.

For autumn, keep a few year-round items on the mantel — such as the artwork and lanterns. But play up harvest colors and textures by spray-painting the lanterns, replacing palm fronds with bittersweet blooms and adding an ombre spray-painted wood-bead garland. Other fireplace mantel ideas include decorative additions, like fall garland, fall swag or pumpkin decorations. Let the garland drape down in front of the bricks. This creates a soft frame that highlights what’s on the mantel.

When decorating a fireplace mantel, whatever the season, grouping similar objects simplifies and organizes your mantel display to create big impact. These lanterns — now spray-painted copper for fall and adorned with fairy string lights — add a soft, whimsical quality during the fall season. The two are also different heights, which adds interest. If possible, vary the size of similar objects in a group.

During the holidays, décor for fireplace mantels grab the spotlight. Family and friends gather by the fireplace, and it’s where Christmas stockings are hung. So you want your mantel to say Christmas, but you don’t have to switch out everything. Add tabletop Christmas trees, real or artificial Christmas garland, pillar candles, candle holders and stocking holders. Also, tweak year-round items with a little red and green. For example, fill a vase with white spray-painted branches instead of holiday blooms and hang a few ornaments on them.

A little touch of red or green may be all it takes to put a year-round mantel object in the Christmas spirit. Here, it’s as simple as making a quick little DIY wreath out of live greenery and berry picks and hanging it on the corner of a large framed print. It’s an artistic take on decorations for a fireplace mantel and one that shows your creative side.

Decor for a fireplace mantel can easily change the mood of a room from season to season. After the holidays, take down the stockings and pare down your fireplace mantel. Quiet the color scheme to wintry whites and rustic wood tones. Remove the ornaments from the branches in the vase, and replace greenery and berries on the wreath with pine cones. To keep the mantel landscape from looking too bleak, add a snowy winter-scene postcard in a frame.

Though a winter mantel calls for more neutral colors, that doesn’t mean the look has to be dull. Catch the eye by incorporating a variety of patterns and textures in your mantel décor. Each of these tabletop trees, for example, offers a different texture — vine, fur and bark pieces — and helps tie the wintry scene together.