If you’re moving into a new place or are planning your next renovation, giving your walls a fresh coat of paint has probably crossed your mind by now. What you might not know, however, is that there are certain tips and tricks you can follow to make every kind of room look amazing, no matter how small or awkward the layout may be. Here are our very own tried-and-true painting secrets for every kind of room.
Rooms with a low ceiling
Low ceilings can be a real pain when decorating your dream home. No matter how large the room is, a low ceiling can make it feel crammed and tiny, affecting the final look of the space. Thankfully, there’s a variety of painting tricks to counteract the low-ceiling look. Glossy ceiling paint, for instance, helps to reflect light, making the entire room feel grander. If the glossy finish is not your cup of tea, consider painting the walls of the room in a darker colour than the ceiling to elevate the latter. Vertical stripes across the walls can also help visually conceal a low ceiling, drawing the eye upwards to give a more spacious impression. Finally, you will want to make sure that your ceiling has minimal texture with a smooth finish, as bumps visually lower the ceiling even further.
Image courtesy of akiHAUS
Small rooms
A well-known way to enhance small rooms is to cover them in white and other light colours. These help to open up the space and reflect any incoming light, brightening the surroundings. If white paint is still not doing enough, reflective paint should get the job done instead. Overall, you should opt for cool tones as opposed to warmer shades, as the former create visual distance, giving the impression of a larger space. If your choice of wall colour is not doing the trick, painting the entire room—including the ceiling—in one solid hue can help to further open up the surroundings by creating visual continuity.
Image courtesy of Wong Weiliang
Large rooms
Not everyone struggles with opening up a small room. In fact, you might very well have the opposite problem. If your space is too large, it can feel sparse and cold, lacking that welcoming, cosy feeling. Warm colours are a good way to go in this scenario, bringing your walls closer and making for an overall friendlier environment. You can also opt for a dark ceiling shade and drag the colour a few inches down the walls, visually lowering the height of the room. To make your room feel particularly contained, make sure to colour-block your walls. This gives the impression of a few cosy sections as opposed to one enormous room with too much empty space.
Image courtesy of Studio FortyFour
Long rooms
Your space might have the perfect size, but an awkward layout can still throw off your entire home design. A room that is narrow and long, for instance, can feel crammed yet simultaneously too big, looking more like a corridor than an actual room. To balance out the length of your space, paint the two shorter walls in a darker shade and cover the longer ones in a light hue. This helps to visually reshape the room, creating the illusion of a more square layout. If you only have one short wall with a solid surface, turn it into a bold feature to achieve a similar effect. You can even use your ceiling to counteract the stretched-out look! Just pick one of the walls and paint it in the same colour as the ceiling, keeping the other walls in a contrasting shade to visually widen the room.
Image courtesy of Berger
Rooms with awkward features
Last but not least, if your room has some awkward features, such as a bomb shelter or a slanted ceiling, you can use paint to conceal them and incorporate them into the overall design. A bomb shelter, for example, will be pretty much hidden away when painted in the same colour as the rest of the walls. You can apply the same trick to a slanted ceiling, maintaining a solid colour throughout the room to draw the eye away from the feature you are attempting to conceal.
Image courtesy of Story Of Us
