Ceiling Features – Look Up – Its a Whole New World

Employing Ceilings as Décor Features

Ceiling features can make an enormous difference to a room. Most homeowners take their ceilings for granted; mostly ignoring them in their decorating. A ceiling is an element that can easily transform the look of an entire room, no matter what style or era of your design.

Here are a some ideas to create ceiling features using wood, glass and of course, paint.

Neutral Ceiling Features

The normal, fail-safe choice is to paint a ceiling vanilla or off white. Its a classic approach. It needs less attention, less maintenance, less cost and creates a visual illusion of a larger room.

If the walls are also painted in light neutral colors, it increases the feel of an open and airy space; even if you have exposed beams as ceiling features, the wall to ceiling all-in-one color exaggerates the size and space of the room.

If the walls are painted in darker colors, a white ceiling exaggerates the height of the room. Adding architectural elements like crown moldings creates a wonderful contrasting feature to the ceiling and wall flat surfaces. Adding wallpaper to create some of these ceiling features, then painting them white is relatively easy and inexpensive.

Here’s a tutorial link to how to install a ceiling medallion. Ceiling medallions can quickly give your room much-needed features to add some character.

It doesn’t have to be all vintage or Victorian. Have some fun with it with your lighting!

No ceiling medallion? No problem, just stencil it like this cute gold stencil medallion below.

Ceilings that Match Wall Paint Colors

Having the ceiling and wall paint colors match, creates a unified design.

The success of this approach relies a lot of the color chosen for both surfaces. If it’s too dark, you can create a ‘box effect’, and needs good natural light to carry it off.

Strong natural light is very important in darker rooms. Even if you layer your electric light with ambient, task and accent lighting, natural lighting always looks better.

By using the same color on your walls and ceiling, you create a soothing harmonious look, uninterrupted by surprising color contrasts.

Different Hue for Ceiling Features

Sometimes having the exact match on the walls and ceiling can be a little too much; maybe it doesn’t suit the room, or maybe its too strong.

You can combine the two options; use the same color, but consider painting the ceiling either a lighter or darker hue than the walls. This creates contrast but keeps the element of coziness by using the same color.

Distance, lighting and shading make ceilings appear darker than walls, so experiment with tints and shades.

Lighter shades will create a more vibrant, dynamic mood, while darker shades create ambient, subdued rooms. Using different tones of the same hue works well for living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, for lighter and brighter rooms. 

Use a Contrasting Color

Featureless rooms can often be made to look more glamorous by painting the ceiling a different color.

Even rooms that don’t get a lot of natural light, painting the ceiling a contrasting color, adds character, making it some place special in the house.

Image a room with white walls and a coat of deep red or sea green on the ceiling; suddenly it becomes a most elegant and chic space.

Painting the ceiling is one of the hardest surfaces to paint and choosing a quality quick drying ceiling paint will help make the job less time-consuming.

While paint is one of the easiest way of decorating the ceiling; don’t discount other materials, like wood or glass, as ceiling features especially if you need more light or texture.