Apartment Decorating: Vintage Record Albums as a Design Element

Decorating with vintage record albums can bring a sense of fun, nostalgia and whimsy to any decorating scheme. It’s an easy way to blend your tastes in style and in music.

Record Albums as a Wallpaper Border

Vintage record album covers of your favorite artists make a really fun, creative boarder for the top of your wall. Whereas a lot of traditional decorating has a strip of wallpaper at the top of your wall, you can get much more creative by placing record album covers there instead. If the actual vinyl record is the look you are going for—and perhaps the room has a theme of a 50’s diner or other nostalgic period where vinyl ruled the music industry—you could place the records themselves sans covers as the border. Get creative. Use a variety of genres or pick all covers by the same artist. If you are really obsessed with one record, consider putting it repetitively on the  wall.

Framed Accents

You may also decorate the wall by framing your classic record albums or covers. Home decorating stores, marts and even music stores now offer record album frames. As record albums are becoming a thing of the past and a part of music history, they are becoming collector’s items. As such, people are longing for ways to protect and preserve them, and a business is coming up to meet that need. Put a few of your favorite albums in some fancy frames that match the photo or mood of the album. Place them out alongside photographs or hang them in focal points on your walls. They will both blend in with traditional photographs and stand out, presenting a unique capture of a certain period and place in time.

Getting a lot of Covers and Making a Collage

If you go to most flea markets, you can get old vintage record albums for a dollar or so. They have huge selections, and you can find almost any mainstream artist that was ever on vinyl there. If you get to know vendors, they’ll look at for certain artists for you as well, as they are happy to have repeat customers. When a dealer brings record albums to a flea market, he usually only brings part of his collection for sale. Be sure to put in requests for your favorite artists.

When you are able to get a lot of record albums at a low price, you won’t feel bad about cutting up the covers for a collage. You can choose to decorate with a collage of your favorite artists of a certain decade, perhaps the decade that the vintage furniture in a certain room is from or from your favorite decade or even the decade that you were born. if you have roommates, you could make it a group project, where everyone contributes their own musical collage of the year they were born for the living room walls.

Vintage record albums can be a fun part of almost any sort of decorating scheme. Focus on balancing your decorating tastes, the layout of the room, the furniture and existing decor, and the overall feel that you’d like your room or home to have.