Montage: 40 Rooms with Maps

I have a definite thing for maps, though I never really considered going all out with them to decorate. I had a stamp collection when I was little. I wasn’t geeky, I just loved matching up the stamps to the right countries in my stamp book. And I loved looking at the world map on the back cover to figure out where all these places were. Randomly, my first job out of college was as the maps editor at a travel magazine, assigning illustrators to execute various styles of maps to accompany the articles. Later my sister worked as a mapmaker. And, most recently, my children bring me home numerous watercolors of maps they painstakingly create at their Montessori school. They’re actually lovely – perhaps I’ll dig some out.

S0, I’ve been collecting images of rooms incorporating maps for a while. By now, lots of blogs have done a round-up of rooms, and even Pottery Barn has plastered them on the walls for their newest catalog. I recently visited a friend with an old map of the Cape executed in an interesting way – the previous homeowners had cut out the landform and mounted it. The guy who owned the original home on our Cape house site also left one of these maps. I had previously deemed it too dingy for display (TDD), but clearly I need to rethink. You can see a picture of my friend’s below. Enjoy the others too. Hopefully there are a few you haven’t seen yet!

Photos: Living Etc.; Apartment Therapy; Cookie; Skona Hem; Diana Kellog Architects; Pottery Barn; Sara Gibane; Steven Gambrel; Jan Gleysteen photographed by Eric Roth; Cookie; Domesticali; Lara Smera; Ferm LIving; Flickr-Ooh Food; Revista TPM; Kelly McGuill; Flickr-bckueser; DIY Magazine; Skona Hem; Flickr-dayataglance; Ara Design Studio via Apartment Therapy; South Stream Design; Flickr-Chez Larsson; Flickr-Posidriv; Apartment Therapy; Cookie; Flickr-Heike Schmidt; Domino; unidentified; photographer Ben Anders; The Goods; Kerry Joyce; Miguel Vidaurre; photographer Jim Franco; Peter Dunham; Adrian Grenier’s home in Domino; Peter Dunham in Domino; Living Etc.; Desire to Inspire.