Coordinating Color & Interior Painting: Wall colors for a "Great Room"

Wall colors for a "Great Room"
11/18/2008 07:16 PM by Gretchen Schauffler

Great rooms live great. They are open floor plans that allow you to enjoy several activities, from cooking, to dining, to watching TV. It allows families to spend quality and quantity time together, multi-tasking between chores and leisure. While great rooms offer an abundance of flexibility, they limit the number of colors you can paint in a room. If you are craving color, do not be afraid. Make a great room great by choosing a fabulous paint colors that fill the room with beauty from head to toe. There is a great big ceiling over great rooms. Ceilings are a HUGE part of a great room’s color scheme.

A typical great room has 2 book ends: a kitchen, dining, and family/living area. This home owner did an awesome job in terms of choosing colors that look good with the furniture and natural surfaces. But leaving the ceiling “color detached” or white without purpose, along with walls in different colors makes the room look choppy.

According to my Devine Math, the walls are less than 40% of the surfaces of the room—the ceiling is a whole lot more.

Colors like Devine Peanut, Sand, Oat or Maple can replace white as the ceiling color and become great neutrals for the home. By carrying the red to both ends of the room and replacing the rest of the walls with the “NEW” warmer neutral, the room looks strong and striking. Instead of 3 colors on the walls, there are three background colors in the room: two on the walls and one on the ceiling.

For this look try Devine Blush, Ginger, devinegreen: Sarsaparilla, or Orangutan.

But why stop there? You can also do colors like Devine Roast or Hazelnut instead. Since there is not much wall surface, try richer colors to give the great room great bone structure and contrast!

Try Devine Cocoa, devinegreen Elephant, or Devine Truffle

If you want to paint the great room a deeper red to really pop the cabinets and accent the dark chocolates, think Devine Sangria, Cabernet, Pinot, devinegreen: Clover or Walrus. Adding richer color allows you to try out richer neutrals like Devine Cafe’, Sumatra, devinegreen: Persian or Impala for an overall richer palette.