Neutral and Natural Fall Fireplace Mantel

This time of year through Christmas is all about nesting in the comfort and warmth of our homes. It’s about gathering, family, and reminiscing. To help create this warm and cozy atmosphere, I like to layer in lots of seasonal elements. So for this quarter of the year only, I’m OK with loading up my family room mantel. The rest of the year, I like a cleaner look and I usually only put one or two simple items on display here.

Because this mantel decor is so busy, one way to keep it calming is to use only neutral and natural shades of brown and white that blend in with the warm, casual atmosphere of the family room. None of the traditional fall orange and yellow to draw extra attention.

My fall formula for this rustic mantel styling is simple… pumpkins, pinecones, copper, and grapevine.

The tones of brown and white with accents of warm copper are subdued but have so much rich texture and interest with the natural pinecones and grapevine mixed with the glass, metal, wood, and pumpkins.

The materials.

To style this mantel, I started by dismantling an extra grapevine wreath I had:

I cut apart the pieces that were holding it together first and pulled them all away.

Tip: Make sure to dismantle it outside because it will make a mess. There’s really no way to avoid any mess while you are working with the grapevine inside but doing this part outside will save a load of cleaning up!

Then I gently worked it apart. This one ended up in about three separate pieces.

I stretched them out for a few minutes while I was getting everything else together. I have read that you can soak the grapevine overnight in water if you want to reshape it. Personally, I didn’t because 1) I wanted it to be curvy and not straight, 2) I didn’t want to wash away the leaves, and 3) I simply didn’t want to wait.

The rest of my elements were already ready to go…

Faux pumpkins all in cream tones, rustic wood containers to use as lifts, copper-colored acorns and pumpkins, and my ever so useful bag of pinecones. (See how I also use them for winter here.)

The assembly.

To assemble the mantel, I began with the grapevine. Putting it on first and tucking everything else in helps keep all of the items in place. Plus, it is almost impossible to add the grapevine after without knocking everything else off.

This is the trickiest part and you really have to work with it to get it to cooperate. But for some reason it is absolutely what makes this styling work so the few minutes spent is worth it.

Tip: I have cup hooks on the sides of my fireplace that stay in place all of the time to hang banners. I made sure to catch one of the meaty branches in each one. I also have three command hooks on top of the mantel. For the grapevine, I only needed to use the middle one, so I ended up sliding off the hooks from the other two. (I’ll be using them at Christmas!)

After wrangling the grapevine to stay, I started tucking in the wood containers and the pumpkin:

Followed by the acorns…

More pumpkins…

And I filled the spaces in with pinecones then added the glass pumpkins (from Kirkland’s a few years ago) and ceramic acorns last.

I finished it off by adding in a couple of small pieces of grapevine here and there and sprinkling the dried grapevine leaves on the mantel that had come out of the wreath.

Tip: Because the grapevine does tend to have a mind of its own, just in case it moved I added command poster tape to the ceramic acorns, the bottom of the middle pumpkin, and even on the side of the mantel to help train the grapevine to stay where I wanted it.

I found these cute ceramic copper acorns at Hobby Lobby this week to add a touch of bright copper to all of these rustic elements.

I love the organic quality and dimension the wild curved grapevine adds!

And the glow of the copper…

And the contrast of dark and light…

The fall mantel really brings up the cozy factor in this room!

As I mentioned, this and Christmas are the only times of year I’m willing to have so much “stuff” on my mantel!

It’s easy to have traditional decor look cluttered. It’s something I discuss in my free guide “5 Secrets for Keeping Traditional Rooms Fresh.” You can download it when you enter your name and email below this post on your mobile or in the sidebar on your desktop. I won’t use those for anything but updates of new posts on the blog!

Our family room looks ready to curl up in under a cozy throw, eat some fall soup, burn a pumpkin scented candle, watch some tv, and heck, maybe even have a fire burning in the fireplace! But let’s not get carried away…we are in Texas! Maybe in late November.:)

You can see how our family room was transformed from weird to welcoming here.

I hope this mantel gave you a few ideas about how to decorate your own and I’d love to hear what you do for fall around your fireplace!

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