Last time I moved house, I was in decorative thrall to the baby estate agent who handled my sale. Neutrals and depersonalised decoration are the key to a quick asking-price offer, he told me. So I beiged my coloured walls until the bossy youth declared himself satisfied. It worked then, but I wonder whether it would be so effective now.

Five years on (my agent will be in his late teens by now, and may have moved on to another career), tastes have changed and white-box living is only for architects and art galleries. Colour is back, along with a yearning for individuality. And an increasing number of homeowners are commissioning wall art for their interiors, from paint effects and panoramas to the digital artworks that are the 21st century’s answer to murals.

Mural decoration is a truly ancient art. Some of the oldest examples are the 31,000-year-old paintings in the caves of the Ardèche. Later, Roman villas were adorned with faux marble pillars, townscapes and rural scenes, while the European aristocracy enjoyed a centuries-long love affair with the mural and its witty sidekick, the trompe l’oeil (views or objects cleverly painted to appear real, like the violin suspended from a doorknob in Chats-worth’s music room). We rejected fancy paintwork only in the minimalist 1990s, largely as a reaction to the decorating atrocities of the previous decade.

In the past 18 months, paint-effect specialists have been more in demand than ever - but with a difference. “In the 1980s, people ragged viridian onto white or combined red and yellow,” says Sara Patey, of Sterling Studios. “Now people want subtle effects that inject a feeling of movement.” So, what are the latest looks? Cross-dragging and frottage are exciting the decorators right now, Patey says. “With cross-dragging, you get an effect like open muslin. It’s a soft drag, done with a brush, so the paint isn’t completely flat. You can drag it horizontally in one colour and vertically in another.” Frottage involves a colour wash, rubbed with paper. The paper is lifted away to reveal an attractively mussed surface – bedhead for paintwork. (Prices on application; www.sterling-studios.com .)

Figurative wall painting is also enjoying a resurgence. Colleen Bery designs elaborate wall and floor decoration for clients from Surrey to Saudi Arabia – from extravagantly curlicued floral compositions to cityscapes of imaginary palazzos, hovering in pale Venetian skies. “We’re over minimalism,” she declares happily. She paints straight onto walls or (less expensive) canvas panels. “I fade the canvas towards the edges and get a lovely texture by sanding it. Once it’s up, it looks as if it’s been on the wall for centuries.” (From £450 per square metre for painted canvas and fitting; www.berydesigns.com .) If a full cityscape is too much, decorate the walls with sparsely scattered motifs. Vanessa Webb specialises in adding details that take the eye to parts of the room you wouldn’t normally look at. She deploys butterflies, floating feathers and leaves across ethereal colourwashed backgrounds. “The leaves look as if they’re being blown by the wind,” she says. “And if they’re in silver or gold paint, they seem to be caught in rays of autumn sunlight.” (Prices on request, from £500; www.stunningfx.co.uk .)

Some of the most inventive trompe l’oeil designs are the architectural compositions by Jane Gordon Clark of Ornamenta. She cites one client who fell in love with the Gozzoli frescoes in the Medici Magi Chapel, in Florence, and wanted the wonderfully costumed figures of the Medici family and their horses reproduced in the dining room of her Georgian home. Gordon Clark worked with photos of the chapel, printing her creation on waxy paper “to give it the look of the original”.

As a cheaper alternative, Surface View creates murals from its photo library, featuring sculptures and botanical paintings from the V&A (pictured above), kitsch artworks from Wayne Hemingway and Stella Mitchell’s Land of Lost Content collection, and Nic Miller’s hyperreal photographs of the British countryside. You can browse images and order online, zooming and cropping to fit any size of room. The murals come as wallpaper-like strips you can either paste yourself or have professionally hung. (From £75 per square metre; www.surfaceview.co.uk .)

So, next time an estate agent advises me to go vanilla, I’ll tell him I’m content with my cross-dragging, thank you very much.

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers