Add sophistication to a room by painting ceiling
My husband and I are moving to a house with a complicated room, a room that requires a vision.
We had selected a color for the space in question, a den-like, narrow family room with a feature fireplace: Benjamin Moore’s Bavarian Forest, a deep shade in the blue-green family. But the line that determined what was ceiling and what was wall was uncertain, my painter pointed out, which was why he suggested it. “I think you paint the ceilings,” he said. I imagined the room swathed in deep green, from the trim to the brick fireplace to, yes, the ceilings. He was right. I told him to do it.
Extending color to the ceiling can add visual interest, texture and sophistication to a room, without much effort. Here’s why you should try it, and how to implement it in your own home.
Sophistication on a budget
Although homeowners have many choices when it comes to adding interest to the ceiling, not all of them are equal. Tray, coffered and beamed ceilings, for instance, change the feel of a room, but they come at a cost, says Arianna Cesa, associate manager of color marketing and development at Benjamin Moore. “Painting your ceiling is the most budget-friendly upgrade if you are looking to add a design element to your ceiling,” she says. “It can absolutely change the look and feel of a space.”
Unlike other ceiling
treatments that cost more money and require a firm design commitment, it’s easy to change paint if you don’t like it, says Hannah Galbreath, owner and designer at Hannah Galbreath Design in Salt Lake City. And if your budget does
not allow for a professional painter, you can take the job on yourself. “It’s something that anyone can do,” Galbreath says. “It’s low-cost, low-consequence.”
Maximum warmth
Smaller rooms, such as dens and offices, can benefit from deep, saturated ceiling colors, which can add subtle warmth, Cesa says. “Darker paint colors can be comforting and cozy,” she adds. “Bringing that color onto the ceiling allows you to be completely enveloped in that hue.” She advises saving this technique for rooms with plenty of light to avoid a “cavelike” feeling. “If the room doesn’t have natural lighting, consider bringing in additional artificial lighting sources,” she says.
“You are trying to create more intimacy,” says Jesse Hunnefeld, owner of Hunnefeld Painting in Massachusetts. He adds that painting a ceiling — particularly in a smaller room or in one with an unusually shaped ceiling — is a good way to draw the room in, creating boundaries and intimacy without adding artificial architectural elements that may cost money and require more time and materials.
A sense of continuity
In rooms where there is no natural 90-degree line between walls and ceiling, painting the ceiling may be the best choice for a clean, crisp look, Hunnefeld says. “You don’t have a natural break, visually, that you do when you have 90-degree perpendicular angles,” he says. “So you’d have to recreate that line, and re-creating that line is complicated in technique, because you’d basically have to freehand.” Painting that line by hand, he says, can leave you with a less-polished look. Extending the color up the wall to the ceiling mitigates this problem.