Best Tapestries for Your Space and How to Style Them (2025)

Chused suggests casting a wide net with your search terms if you’re looking online—antique textiles, Aubusson panels, woven wall hangings, or even fragmented tapestries—while Kemble favors textiles of specific provenances, like Dutch and Flemish styles. Rugs and suzanis—a traditional and ornate Uzbek textile—also make great tapestries, often at more reasonable price points.

Spots like Etsy, 1st Dibs, and eBay are of course fertile ground for sourcing all kinds of artisanal wares old and new, though the contemporary market also offers approximations that accomplish the same feel—grounding, present, worldly—without the same budgetary concerns, from a Pottery Barn floral textile that feels like something inherited from an ancient relative to a frescoed Anthropologie tapestry with a weathered Italian feel.

For the lucky few with a wider budget and the air miles to shop abroad, Chused swears by sourcing in France—especially the markets around Paris and the dealers in the South. She’s also found success in Belgium and northern Italy, but says “it’s less about one perfect place and more about being open to the search, the unexpected, and having an eye for the right tone, texture, and age.”

In my own research, I’ve found Warp and Weft magazine’s archive to be a trove for surfacing living artists you can commission for textiles and tapestries, such as Tais Rose and Misako Nakahira. Generally, a little curiosity, an Instagram account, and the rise of the creator economy prove extremely handy when you’re tapestry hunting for something individual.

…Plus, How to Style It

Made to suit castles and grand halls, it takes a little finesse to style a tapestry in a modern setting. “I like to treat a tapestry like a piece of art or an architectural finish, not just a decorative object,” says Chused. “That means thinking about scale, composition, and how it interacts with the rest of the room—whether it’s offsetting something highly tailored or grounding a more eclectic mix.”

A busy or Verdure tapestry can create a focal point in a space that needs direction or impact, while facilitating a comfortable sense of enclosure, like the Aubusson piece in this Park Slope brownstone or this eclectic home in London. Meanwhile, two complementary tapestries above a couch or in an entryway can create a design throughline that ties a room together.

Kemble approaches styling by considering how a piece might redirect the focus of a room. Where a rug’s impact is often lost under the weight of other furniture, wall art draws the eye upwards. She likes to consider the tapestry’s colors as her room’s neutrals, and builds from there, employing deep greens and blues as neutrals instead of typical beiges. Mixing an antique textile with modern furniture allows you to “play with contrast and very contrary design styles,” says Kemble. “You’re using it in a contrived, almost ironic state” against bright whites, chromes, simple decor, or opposing matte shelves.

Chused also suggests incorporating tapestries in offbeat ways—as unexpected upholstery, perhaps, or even as soft doors or dividers—like this upstate New York barn which forgoes the traditional headboard above the bed for a tapestry. “It’s about respecting the history of the piece while giving it a new kind of relevance,” she says. “When they’re integrated thoughtfully, they feel less like a nod to the past and more like a piece of the present with a really beautiful backstory.”

A Few Tapestries, Old and New, to Consider: