What Color Makes a Small Room Look Bigger?

0:00Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. You're listening to Home in Progress by Rev. ColiPain sponsored by Benjamin Moore. And this week is a huge episode on color and how to choose the right colors for spaces in your home and all of that stuff. And I know that's ridiculously vague. We're going to get into just a ton of different things. Do dark colors bring the ceiling lower? Do dark colors maybe make the ceiling seem higher? What about dark walls? What's the best option if you're painting a tiny room and you want it to feel a little more spacious or at least less chopped up? All of those little questions, things we deal with on a regular basis. We're going to hit all of those questions and more coming up in a few minutes here. But right now I want to go back and start the show by talking or tapping back into the furniture refinishing series that I started last week. Now last time I talked about how to look at an old dresser, table, cabinet, whatever that you've found in a thrift store or on Facebook Marketplace and decide whether it's actually

1:03worth bringing home. That was last week. Today let's say you found one. You know you found something pretty spectacular. Now before you start sanding it, stripping it, or really doing pretty much anything to it, there's one question. One thing you should do, one question you should answer first, is there lead in the finish? And if you're working on an older painted piece, the answer is possibly. In fact, the older the piece is and the more layers of paint it has, the greater the chance that lead base paint is buried in there somewhere. And you need to know that. You need to know if it's there so you can work accordingly. Or decide that the project isn't something you want to take on. Lead paint is especially concerning during refinishing projects because you're disturbing it. You've got an old lead base coating and it's intact on a dresser, let's say, and it's covered by newer paint, maybe a couple layers of newer paint and you're leaving it alone. Maybe you're just putting another layer of paint over top of it. The exposure risk in that scenario is pretty low.

2:05But if you're going to start scraping it or sanding it or grinding it or breaking that coating into chips and dust and all of that, you know, you do that. You're creating airborne material that can be inhaled or spread around your home. And that's when it gets to be more concerning. So before you do any of that, you want to make sure that you test the coatings on the piece that you just bought. Lead test kits, they're inexpensive, super inexpensive, readily available online. They're generally simple screening tests. You know, you expose the coating, follow the directions and then look for the indicated color change. Just watch a video. You'll pick it up in about four seconds. It's that simple. And just make sure that you're not testing just the paint that's on the surface right now. You know, that old dresser might have been painted white five years ago with perfectly modern latex paint. But underneath that could be another coat from the 70s and underneath that something much older. And if you're going to be sanding through all those layers, you need to know what you're getting into. And one more thing worth knowing when we talk about lead on old furniture, paint is where

3:10most of the concerned goes and rightly so. The lead compounds were also sometimes used as drying agents in older oil based varnishes and related finishes. So if you're working on something genuinely old, don't automatically assume that a clear finish means there's nothing to think about. Test that as well before you start sanding, scraping, doing all of that. And if you do get a positive result, that's where you probably want to stop treating it like an ordinary refinishing project. You know, don't just start sanding and toss on a dust mask, you know, figuring you're going to be okay that way. There are specific ledsay for practices for dealing with those coatings and the EPA has homeowner guidance online that walks you through them. You know, you can still do the work at home if you choose, but you're going to want to understand the best practices for protecting yourself and your family. So go online and find that. Today's not really about going through all of that on air. I just want you to know enough to test first. Do a little research, know what you're dealing with before you start creating dust. All right. You probably heard the design idea or the design concept, dark colors recede and light

4:13colors advance. We've said it on the show many, many times. But what does it actually mean? Does it mean that dark colors will make a room feel bigger? You know, because they're receding, they're moving away from us or something else going on. We're going to answer that question in a ton more right after this. Home and Progress has brought to you by Rubco Light Paints and Benjamin Moore. You know, people often think of paint as just another line item on the project's supply list. And the thing, everything you do, every hour of prep, every stroke of the brush, all comes down to the quality of the paint. The paint is the project. Make sure it's the best. And we're back. You're listening to Home and Progress by Rubco Light Paints sponsored by Benjamin Moore. And last week, we spent some time talking about color capping, which if you missed it really quickly, it's basically the idea of using several related colors in one room and then changing them as you move upward. You know, so basically picture one color on the walls, another color on the crown molding, and another color on the ceiling, each one getting progressively darker as you move up. Now, it's a cool idea and we're starting to see a little bit more of it.

5:16But one of the things that I mentioned in that segment was that if you've got a small room, you know, with a lower ceiling, not a lot of natural light, I said, if you've got that situation, I'd probably give some thought to it before automatically putting your darkest color on the ceiling. And it bugged me to say that. And you know, as I was doing it, as I was recording it, I kept debating if I would say that. And it bugged me because it's kind of going against some stuff that we've said multiple, multiple times on the show throughout the years. And basically what we've talked about is this design concept that dark colors recede and light colors advance. We've specifically brought it up in terms of ceiling color that dark colors recede. We've said it designers on the show have said it designers all over the internet will talk about it. They'll say that if you sometimes want to make a room feel more expansive and they make the ceiling feel further away, a dark color goes up there and that will make that ceiling

6:18recede and feel further away. And I know that we've said that. Like I said, I know designers have said that. But when I was working on the segment for color capping, I just couldn't get it out of my head that I've really not experienced that myself, not consistently. You know, I've been in plenty of rooms, little smaller rooms with dark colors on the ceiling, dark colors on the walls, where that room feels really small. You know, the idea that dark colors recede would make me think it's going to feel bigger, more expansive. But in reality, I've been in a lot of places where that didn't play out. And so because of that experience, I kind of left my warning in there about, you know, just thinking it through before you put that darker color on a smaller room ceiling. But as I thought about it even further, I realized there are plenty of rooms that I've been in where they've had a darker color on the ceiling. And it has made the ceiling feel like it's further away.

7:21It feels like the walls are a little further away when they're dark. And in the world is going on with all of that. You know, it bugged me all week so much so that I decided I'm going to dig into it for this week's show. You know, the thing that I'm getting at is if there is a design rule, and there is a design rule that people talk about all the time, dark colors recede. If that's the case, if that's a rule that dark colors recede, why don't they always seem to recede? Why does it seem to be such a hit or miss kind of a thing? We got to be missing something. At least Dan is missing something. So that's what I dug into. And when I started digging into it, one of the very first things that I learned is that the whole idea that light colors advance and dark colors recede that didn't just come out of nowhere. You know, there's actually research and human perception that supports that idea. You know, a lot of that earlier research work involved objects or shapes set against backgrounds. You know, basically lighter colored shapes are objects in front of a darker background.

8:23They tend to come visually forward while the darker material, the background, seems to fall further back. That's the idea, the observed phenomena, and somewhere along the way that idea became a very simple decorating rule that light colors advance and dark colors recede. And it makes sense in a lot of situations. We can imagine it very, very easily. You know, put a cream colored sofa against a deep navy wall, let's say. What happens when you do that? You know, just picture it. What happens? The sofa jumps out, right? Maybe there's some light artwork on the wall or a lamp or a couple of lighter pillows. Your eye is going to go to all of those things and that navy wall is going to kind of become a background. So we say the navy recedes and that's perfectly reasonable. But here's where this gets really interesting. A wall or a ceiling, it's not just another object sitting against a background. We might be thinking about this in the wrong way. A wall or a ceiling is one of the surfaces that actually defines the size of the room. Okay, not the same as an object sitting against a background.

9:27And eventually, researchers started honing in on that and they started studying that specifically. In 2010, for example, researchers published a study looking at how the lightness of walls and ceilings affected how a room appeared, you know, size-wise. What they did was they created virtual rooms where the physical dimensions stayed exactly the same. It could manipulate how light or dark the different surfaces appeared to be. And generally, when they did that, lighter ceilings to all the test subjects, lighter ceilings appeared higher than darker ceilings. So that's the research that comes out of 2010. They continued the research and in 2018, researchers started looking more broadly at the surfaces, all of the surfaces defining the room. You know, not just the ceiling, but the side walls, the wall at the far end. And of course, they kept going with the ceiling. And what they found was really pretty interesting and right in line with the earlier findings. They found that brighter side walls tended to make the room feel to the test subjects wider.

10:30It was pretty conclusive. They felt the people in the experiment felt like the rooms were wider. They explained, you know, they would give an idea, an estimate of how wider room was. And when the walls were light, they always guessed that it was a little bit bigger than when they put a darker color on those walls. That always shrunk it down a little bit. Brighter wall at the far end, same kind of thing. It tended to make the room appear deeper to the test subjects than a darker wall at the far end. So now, when we've got all of that data, we're sitting here with kind of a contradiction. You know, we've got the traditional design rule that says dark recedes. But when researchers specifically measured where people thought the actual boundaries of a room were, brighter surfaces tended to appear further away. So what's going on with all of that? Well, I think I've got an answer to all of this. And the first thing I think we need to do is clear up the word recede. You know, go back to that Navy wall behind the cream sofa, that example.

11:31Your eye goes to the sofa, it goes to the artwork, it goes to the lamp, and that Navy wall sort of settles into the background. And so we say it recedes. But that doesn't necessarily mean that your brain thinks the wall itself is further away. Okay. Just saying it recedes doesn't mean that our brain thinks the wall is further away. This is a little complicated, but it does make sense when you think it through. It may simply mean that the wall is no longer the thing that's getting your attention. You know, the sofa is the star, the artwork is the star. The Navy becomes the background. You know, it's not necessarily further away. It's just not prominent anymore. And that's a really, you know, a very real effect, but it's different from actually making the room look deeper or bigger. That's the first thing I'd say in all of this. When designers, when people say dark colors recede, sometimes what they mean is the dark color takes a back seat. Not that the wall now looks five feet further away. And once we accept, you know, that concept, a lot of what we experience regarding dark

12:33colors in rooms, can start to make more sense. You know, with that understanding of the concept of recede and what we mean by recede, we can see how that Navy wall can absolutely become a background, you know, behind a light sofa. Well, at the same time, a lighter wall color behind that sofa might make the actual room appear a little deeper, a little bigger than that darker color. Okay. So I think that makes sense, but it doesn't even matter because there's another complication. A dark wall doesn't automatically become the background either. Let's change the room, for example, take away the cream sofa, take away the light artwork, the lamp, all the different things we talked about. Just leave that Navy as one accent wall at the end of an otherwise really light room. You know, light walls on both sides, white ceiling, white trim, and sitting right in the middle of all of that is this huge dark navy rectangle. Well, if that's the room that you're looking at, does that dark color recede at that point? Well, I would say probably not. Your eye is going to actually be drawn to that color. You know, it's the same blue is in the other room that we described, but now it's kind

13:38of the star of the show rather than just a background or supporting actor. So what in the world is going on with this? And trust me, I'm going somewhere practical with this. It's going to make sense, and I've got a point or a reason for talking about it, but we do have to call out all these little inconsistencies first so we can get at what's really happening. Anyway, how can a dark color in a room, you know, in one room, fade into obscurity and then in a different room, that same color stands out as the first thing that we notice. Well, that happens because of another key idea to keep in mind whenever you're choosing colors, contrast, whatever stands out from the surroundings is going to be the thing that gets our attention in the first room, the lighter furniture and the artwork stood out against that navy wall. So they got our attention and the navy kind of just became the background. It receded. In this room, the second room that we described, the navy stands out pretty much against everything around it. So now the navy gets our attention. It's the same color, different result, because whether a color becomes the background

14:40or the focal point really depends a lot on what you put next to it and what else in the room is competing for your attention. So contrast, that's one thing to keep in mind. Another factor to keep in mind that can completely change the relationship, you know, with these colors and all of that is the lighting. You know, lighting can make or break this effect. Go back to that navy wall. It's just the example that I want to keep going back to. If you've got a lot of light hitting that wall, you can clearly see the surface. You see the texture of the wall. Just imagine that. You know, the light is on the wall. You see the roller texture a little bit. You see the corner really clearly. You know, if there's some sheen on the wall, you may see light reflecting across the surface a little bit or back at you. You know, the wall is dark, but it's not exactly disappearing at that point. You know, it's still giving your eye all kinds of little reminders that the surface is right there. Now, imagine that same wall in a flatter finish, you know, with the room lighting positioned so that most of the illumination is happening out in front of the wall. You know, the furniture is lit, the artworks lit, the people are lit, but the dark wall

15:41itself sits further back in softer light. In that situation, the wall may become much less visually distinct and that can produce that experience we've been talking about where a dark wall seems to fall away behind everything else. Same thing with the ceiling, you know, a dark ceiling. If the lights are right there shining on it and you see the roller marks and, you know, just the roller texture or a finish from the paint or something like that, or just you see the ceiling more clearly, the illusion's broken. You know, it's a dark color, but it's close. You know that. If the lights hang a little bit lower and it just gives that softer light on that ceiling, it can tend to feel a little more cavernous, a little further away. So lighting that leaves a dark surface in relative shadow can have a huge effect on whether it visually recedes into the background or not. But conversely, lighting research also shows that brightly illuminated light walls generally increase the overall sense of spaciousness of a room. So if you want the room to feel bigger, brightly light those lighter colored walls.

16:44Remember, receding is not the same as feeling more open, more spacious. There's a lot going on here. And I really think at the end of all of this, the biggest lesson that we can take from all of this is that the whole dark colors, recede light colors, advanced thing is trying to do too much. You know, we're using a single small rule to explain and predict something that an entire room plays a role in creating. You know, color matters, contrast matters, as we just mentioned, lighting matters. But beyond those things, I didn't even get to it, but furniture matters, the ceiling height matters, the windows matter, the sight line into the next room. You know, that matters, even the clutter in the room, all of those things matter, which is exactly why the lab studies that I referenced earlier are so useful. You know, researchers, they strip out all of those things, all of the variables away, and then they ask one narrow question. If we can change only the lightness of the space of a surface, what happens? And on that question, the results have been pretty consistent.

17:44Lighter ceilings tend to look higher. Higher side walls tend to make a room look wider. Lighter back walls tend to look further away. So if your goal is a room that feels as large and area as possible, lighter is still to say for bad. But it doesn't mean that dark rooms can't feel spacious. They absolutely can. It just means that when those rooms feel spacious, the paint isn't the only thing doing the work. You know, everything around it is working towards that same goal. So rather than ask, you know, do dark colors make a room bigger or smaller? Maybe the better question is to ask, what do I want color to do in this room? And don't forget the other questions to ask, what am I working with, you know, in the room? What's the situation of the space? How does it lay out? What's the natural lighting look like? You know, what can I do with contrast to help me get where I want to go? And asking all of those things is a little more involved than just paratine, you know, the dark colors received like colors advanced mantra, but I think it's going to get you to more consistent, happier results. All right. Now what I'd like to do is to put some of that into practice and demonstrate how to use

18:48those ideas to land on the right tones for your space. So we're going to take some common rooms and we'll talk about some specific goals that you might have for them. And then we'll dial into which color choices are most likely to get you there. And we'll do all of that right after this. Home and Progress is brought to you by Reptolite paints and Benjamin Moore. Think about it. It's always prepping, sanding, taping, and then finally painting. Don't throw all that work away with an inferior product. The paint isn't just another supply. The paint is the project. Make sure it's the best. And we're back. You're listening to Home and Progress by Reptolite Paint, sponsored by Benjamin Moore. And before the break, we spent a ton of time digging into this old design rule that dark colors received and light colors advance. It's a phrase that we hear quite a bit. We read about it online quite a bit. It's a phrase that we've used here on the show quite a bit. And most of the time, when we run into it, when we're using it, whatever, we're using

19:48it to say how maybe a dark ceiling or a dark wall, rather than enclosing a room like we might expect, it will actually recede and potentially make the room feel a little bit bigger. That's kind of the implication. That's at least the way I've used it in the past on the show. Now the thing is, I've always struggled with that a little bit. It always feels like there's just something missing. You know, I understand the whole science of it that dark colors fade to the, I get all of that. But I've been in rooms that are dark rooms that don't feel big and expansive or bigger and expansive than the same room painted with lighter colors. It just doesn't seem to always play out in the real world. You know, sometimes it works just fine. Sometimes it doesn't seem to work. And that's always bugged me a little bit. So I dug into it this past week and I talked about everything that I learned last segment. And the bottom line is this. It's not as simple as just saying dark colors recede and light colors advance.

20:49That rule is just too simple. You know, there's more going on than just that. And that's why there seems to be inconsistencies in applying it in the real world. And we spent last segment talking about a lot of those different things that are also going on. And contrast matters. So does lighting. Ultimately the whole room matters. You know, the furniture you have, the scale of it, how much of the furniture you've got, even the clutter that's going on in that space. All of those things work together or they work against each other in little bits. And that's what determines how we perceive a color and its effects in a space. And that really was the point of last segment. We spent a ton of time sorting through the theory. Now let's make it useful or practical. Because when you're actually standing in a room trying to choose a color, you're probably not asking, do dark colors technically recede? What did that guy in the radio say? Can't remember. You're asking, how do I make this low ceiling feel a little bit higher? Or how do I make this big room feel a little more comfortable? Maybe you're asking, how do I use color to draw attention to this ceiling or some other architectural

21:52feature? Those are much more useful questions. So let's take some common situations one at a time and apply what we talked about in the last segment. Basically what I'm going to do is instead of starting with a rule, we're going to start with the room and we're going to ask, what do I want color to do here? And what am I working with that's going to help me or that I've got to overcome to get where I want to go? That's the plan. First situation that I want to talk about. First situation that kind of slurred that. But I'm going to keep it because I'm going to just keep moving. First situation, maybe you want a low ceiling to look higher. This one's probably the cleanest, probably the clearest, probably the easiest. If you've got an eight foot ceiling, maybe even a lower ceiling and your biggest concern is making the room feel as tall and open as possible. Generally speaking, I'd stay relatively light overhead. You know, that's where the research we talked about last segment is strongest. Lighter ceilings tend to appear higher than darker ceilings. And lighter walls help too. That was another finding in the research.

22:53I don't think I talked about that or at least I didn't go into it very, very deeply last segment. But lighter walls paired with a lighter ceiling generally gave the impression of more height in a space. So if maximum apparent height is your goal in a given space, a light wall color and a very light ceiling are probably your strongest combinations. You can bring color onto the ceiling. You don't have to go with just a stark white, but definitely lean toward the lighter tones here. And I'd be cautious about allowing that ceiling color to be perceptibly darker than your wall color. That's going to work against you. So keep it lighter than the wall color. For example, maybe you've got green walls and you go to a soft pale green on the ceiling, something like that. You're still giving the ceiling color, but you're keeping the ceiling itself relatively light. And that's the important part. That's what's going to help you give the illusion of a little more height. All right, second situation I want to talk about. Let's say you've got a long narrow room and you want to change the proportions. Now, this one gets a little more interesting than the first one.

23:55You know, maybe you've got a hallway. Maybe it's a long narrow living room. And every time you walk into it, it just feels like a tunnel. Like you're a little train moving through a little tunnel. Well, if that's what you're dealing with, the research that we talked about earlier, last segment, actually gives some really specific guidance here. If the room feels too narrow, keep those two long side walls relatively light in the research that we talked about last segment, lighter side walls tend to do appear further apart. And it's working in your favor if you're trying to create more apparent width. And there's a lighting benefit as well. Lighter colors reflect more of the available light back into the space, which can help reduce some of those darker edges and shadows that can make a space feel even more tunnel like. Now, what about the wall at the far end? If you want that hallway or the room to feel longer or deeper, keep that wall again, that far wall relatively light. Researchers found that a lighter rear wall tend to do appear further away. Now, if the room already feels too long and you actually want to visually shorten it,

24:56then you flip things around. A deeper color on that far wall can make that boundary feel more present and a little closer. Now, I know this is maybe the opposite of what many of you have run into on design blogs and so on. I'm going out on a limb here. We hear a lot of design advice saying that a dark accent wall at the far end of a space makes a room look deeper. But when the researcher specifically measured perceived depth, that's not what happened. That's not what they found. The lighter rear wall always appeared further away. The darker rear wall always appeared closer. Now, remember, everything we talked about in the last segment, I'm isolating right now the lightness or the darkness of a color. That's all I'm really talking about and what that will do. In the research, when they change the lightness of that far wall and held everything else steady, that lighter wall tend to do up here further away and the darker wall tend to do up here closer. We've covered that. But your hallway isn't a controlled experiment. So lighting, contrast, furniture, openings, all of those things can change the final effect.

25:59A dark wall that's brightly illuminated and clearly defined may feel very, very present right in your face. That same dark wall in a softer light where its edges and surface aren't as obvious may seem to fall much more into the background. So don't hear this exclusively as dark walls equal a shorter room period end of the story. Here it has generally speaking, lightness is going to push perceived depth in one direction and darkness is going to push it in the other. But then, of course, the rest of the room has to have it say. So just keep all of that in mind. I know it's a little vague. I think what it really reinforces is sample your colors. I'm giving you kind of a rule of thumb, but sample those colors to see what your space is doing with them. And one other thing that just crossed my mind that's connected to this idea, if you've already painted, let's say a wall, a dark color at the end of a hallway and you were really hoping that it was going to make that back wall feel further away. Maybe it's a short hallway. You were hoping it would increase the distance, but you're finding it didn't.

27:03Well before you completely change that color and start over, see if there's something you could do with lighting or a contrasting piece of furniture or art that would help that wall recede a bit. It could be that the wall color will work for you. You're just not using the best lighting or enough contrast to push it in the right direction. So think about that. Moving on. A third situation. Let's say you've got a room that doesn't get much natural light and you want it to feel brighter. It's a really common situation. Maybe the room's a north facing room. Maybe the windows are small. Maybe it's a hallway or a basement that just doesn't get much daylight. If your goal is to make that room feel brighter and more open, of course, stick with the lighter end of the color range. Light paint, it's not going to create light, but it can reflect more of the light that you actually get and it can help distribute it around the room. So lighter walls and a lighter ceiling, they're really working with you here. That doesn't mean necessarily grabbing the brightest, darkest white that you can find.

28:03Lighting changes color enormously. A white that looks beautiful in a sunny room can actually look kind of cold and dingy in a dim room. So again, sample those colors. It's really, really important. Benjamin Moore recommends warmer off whites for the situation that we're describing. Warmer off whites like Swiss coffee, Acadia white. Those kinds of colors for spaces that don't have a lot of natural light. You can also use soft light colors instead of off whites like I'm talking about. But the important thing is that you're keeping enough lightness with your color to make use of the illumination that you do have in that space. Fourth situation. And one other thing is all these colors that I'm mentioning, I'll put them in the show notes. So if you do want to go back and check out the colors for specific situations, there's a lot of other colors you could choose. Just dropping a few names here and there. If you do want to hear or get those notes, just go check the show notes. They're all there. All right. Fourth situation. Let's say you want the walls in your space to become the backdrop in the room.

29:07We've talked about this one quite a bit in the last segment. So you probably know the answer. Why don't you take a few minutes, think it over, talk it over, decide on how you achieve that in your space and we'll get to the answer right after this. You're listening to home in progress where the projects are real, the mistakes, their educational, sometimes painful, mostly educational, and the only thing more stubborn than that old wallpaper on your bathroom wall is your determination to get it fixed. Probably sponsored by Repco Light Paints and Benjamin Moore, paint with a purpose, people who care, and everything you need to get the job done right. And we're back. You're listening to home in progress by Repco Light Paints, sponsored by Benjamin Moore, and we're talking about some specific room situations. You know, certain goals you may want to achieve in a given room and some limitations that you may be dealing with in that space. Now, I pick some common situations and we're kind of just working our way through how to achieve the goals that you've got by using the right colors.

30:09The fourth situation that I want to talk about is this. Let's say you want your walls in a given room to become the backdrop. You know, maybe you've got beautiful furniture, beautiful artwork, a fireplace, maybe the room has architectural details that you want people to notice. And you don't want the wall color really competing with that. Well, if that's your situation, like we talked about last segment, this is where deeper colors can work incredibly well. So hail, Navy, vintage vogue, soot, all of those Benjamin Moore colors. Those are colors that will help create beautiful backgrounds behind lighter furniture, artwork, metals, fabrics. You name it. That will get you where you want to go. That what if your furniture is dark, you know, or the artwork is dark or all of that. If you've got darker pieces, well, don't assume that a dark wall is automatically going to become the background in those situations. Now you need to think about other kinds of contrast. You know, what can you do to create that contrast? What other colors can you bring in? What textures can you bring in?

31:09What sheen can you bring in? What lighting can you use? You know, to separate the things that you want people to notice from the wall behind them. So what I'm getting at is maybe the furniture. Gets more light than the wall. Maybe that will help create that contrast. Maybe the artwork that you've got gets reframed. You know, you put it in a lighter material, you know, a frame with a lighter material on metallic, a lighter wood. Now, maybe the wall behind the artwork or the furniture isn't a true flat and you could opt for a different sheen that would allow it to kind of fade away a little bit more. You know, who knows? Really, you're just trying to do anything to create some contrast. So those elements that you've got stand out and then that will let the wall recede into the background. You know, if you want that wall to function as a backdrop, you've got to make sure that the things you want people to notice actually stand out from it. So work on that. If you've got darker pieces, it's going to take a little bit of work to do that. But you can get there. All right, fifth situation that I want to talk about. Let's say you've got a room. It's a small room and you want it to feel less boxed in.

32:12Now, this one needs a little bit of time to work through because there are really two possible goals here. You know, when I say you've got a small room and you want it to feel less boxed in, we all know what that feels like. But actually, you know, there could be two goals that you're trying to achieve here. If you want the room to look as physically large and wide and airy as possible, well, of course, then lighter colors are going to be the safer direction. You know, that's what all the research supports. But maybe that's not what you're trying to do. Maybe it's a tiny powder room and you know, it's going to be tiny no matter what. And what you're really saying is I don't want to be so painfully aware of every single wall and every piece of trim and every little break in this room. It just feels so broken up. I just can't handle that. You know, if that's what you're dealing with, color drenching becomes a really interesting option here. Paint the walls and the trim the same color. You know, maybe the door is too. Maybe even the ceiling, depending on the room and the effect you're after. And if you do that, what you're doing is reducing the contrast between all of those

33:14different surfaces. So instead of seeing wall, baseboard, door, casing, wall again, all of those things start to become one more continuous composition. And here's an important thing to think about when you're talking about color drenching or when I'm talking about color drenching. The color doesn't have to be dark to make this work. You could color drench that little room in something like palladium blue. Benjamin Moore's HC-144. It's a soft, kind of airy blue green. It's got just enough color to keep the room interesting without weighing it down. That's palladium blue. You could go to healing allo, which is Benjamin Moore's 1562. It's a very pale muted green, you know, a little bit of a soft gray quality to it. So you could do that. You could go with a little bit of a lighter tone or you could go deep with something like vintage vogue and create something much more enveloping and dramatic. So it's the same basic technique, color drenching, completely different results. So when you say that the room's boxed in, if you want to make it feel less chopped up, make first and foremost about minimizing contrast.

34:15That's primarily the color drenching and just figure out the depth of color you want to use for that. If you want it to feel less chopped up and as open and spacious as possible, then I'd stick with the color drenching. I'd still do that. Just make sure you're picking lighter colors. All right, the sixth situation I want to talk about. Let's say you want to make the ceiling part of the design. You really want that ceiling to stand out. You've got the opposite problem from number one, let's say. The first one that we talked about with the low ceiling, you've got plenty of height up there. You've got 10 feet, 12 feet, a huge vaulted ceiling. If I were in a room like that, I would feel, oh man, if you completely lost in a space like that, it'd feel cavernous. Maybe you've got that or maybe you've got a tray ceiling or a great crown molding or some other architectural feature overhead that you actually want people to notice. You really want to draw attention to that. If that's the situation you're dealing with, either one of those things, any of those things, you can go deeper with your color.

35:15So think Chelsea Gray, HC168 or Regent Green or Hail Navy, any of those. If you've got a big space like that, a deeper color on the ceiling can make all of that height feel a little more intimate. If you've got great architecture overhead, the contrast between it and the ceiling can really set it apart as a real feature. The opposite works too. If you want color overhead but you don't want the ceiling to become a focal point, we'll just keep the relationship between the wall and the ceiling more subtle. Maybe you've got a medium blue on the walls and a softer lighter blue overhead, less contrast. That's what you're shooting for. Less contrast is going to draw less attention. Last situation, let's get back to color capping because that's where it really started this whole conversation in the first place. If you're color capping a space, how dark should you go overhead? There really isn't one answer here. If you've got a large room, good natural lighting, plenty of ceiling height and you want drama, that classic color capping progression deeper and deeper and deeper as you move upward,

36:19that can really, really work well. You've got room to play with that and to make it work. Let's say you've got an eight foot ceiling and a small bedroom with one little window, like I described last week. Again, I'm going to fall in the caution range. It might be a little cautious about sticking with color capping in its traditional format, or at least traditional. It's only a couple of years old. In the way that we normally see it, just progressively getting darker, it probably lean a little bit away from that. Maybe you don't want to make each step so dramatic in the shift. Maybe you've got a richer color on the walls and the crown, but keep the ceiling towards a lighter end. Maybe you reverse the progression a little bit. There's nothing really sacred or set in stone about the darkest color having to end up overhead. Color capping is just a design idea. It's not a law. Nothing like that. You do what you want. It's America. Anyway, I think the three biggest takeaways I got from all of this, and I hope you get from all of this, from the last few segments anyway, are these three.

37:19First off, don't just blindly accept a design concept as a hard and fast rule. Dark colors recede, sounds good, and it's demonstrably true in certain aspects. But there are other things going on, lighting, contrast, the room itself, that determine how much those darker colors recede to the background. Keep that in mind. Second, even when dark colors do recede in our space, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to look further away. That may or may not be true depending on all the things that we just talked about, lighting, contrast, and so on. However, research is pretty clear that lighter colors do give the impression of wider, higher, more open spaces. And even though you'll find a lot of blog posts out there suggesting the opposite, in many situations, a lighter, area color is going to help you create the illusion of heightened space better than a dark color. That's the second thing. Third thing, when choosing your colors, don't immediately get hung up on all the design rules out there. Don't start with all of those. Instead, start with the room itself and your goal for the room.

38:21That's going to help you with all of the rules that you encounter. Start with your room and what you want from it. Is it too narrow? Is it too long? Is it too dark? Is it too chopped up? Do you want the walls to disappear behind the furnishings or do you want the ceiling to become the star of the space? Once you know the job that you're asking the color to do, then all of the principles that we talked about, lightness, contrast, lighting, those things, but all the other design rules as well. All of them then become tools that you can use instead of rules that you're just kind of blindly following. As always, remember that we've got color experts on hand at every repco light who can help you sort through whatever you're working on. One last thing, because we spend an awful lot of time talking about putting color on ceilings, if that's what you're doing, take a look at Benjamin Moore's Waterborne ceiling paint in the Ultra Flat Finish. I mentioned it last week, but this product is really built for exactly the scenario. Benjamin Moore makes it available in all of their colors and it maintains that flat finish, that ultra-dead flat finish.

39:22Even when you start getting into stronger colors, and that's a big deal overhead, because an ultra-flat finish reduces glare, hides imperfections, and helps minimize the appearance of landmarks. You know, ceilings, they're not always the easiest surface to paint perfectly, so if you're going to go to all the trouble of putting a great color overhead, give yourself a product that's going to make a great looking finish a whole lot easier to achieve. That's Benjamin Moore's Waterborne ceiling paint, Ultra Flat. Alright, that's going to do it for this episode. If you want to catch it again, you can find it online at RepcoLike.com. Whatever you do today, make sure paints are part of it, have a great weekend everybody, and I'll see you next week for Home in Progress by RepcoLikePaints. I'm Dan Hansen. Thanks for listening.