Small living rooms are cozy, and they provide just enough room for your loved ones to gather without being overwhelming. While you may love how much easier it is to keep a smaller room clean, it is also common to wish that the living area felt bigger. Decorating your living room well can go a long way towards making it seem more spacious. A well-placed mirror can reflect the other side of the room to create the illusion of more depth. You can also choose smaller pieces of furniture to leave more floor space showing. In addition to implementing a few decorating tricks, painting the room the right color can have a tremendous impact upon a room’s appearance. When you are wondering what colors make a living room look bigger, you’ll love that some of the most popular hues for house paint are on the list for making rooms look expanded.
When you work with professional painters, they can offer you plans for painting specific parts of the room. These are all potential ways that you can use paint to create the feeling of more space:
•Paint an accent wall in a bold color
•Painting the doors, trim and walls in the same color
•Choosing a color based upon the lighting in the room
•Using a lighter shade on the ceiling to generate a sense of height
Every room is different, which means that what works for your neighbor’s living room might not work for yours. This is why it is best to get a personalized paint consultation when you pick out your colors. Now that you know how you can paint the room to make it feel bigger, you’re ready to start checking out some of the latest colors to round out your home decorating color palette.
Explore How These Colors Create the Illusion of More Space
As a general rule, lighter colors create a stronger sense of space, while darker colors can make a room feel more closed off. However, this isn’t always the case. As you look through this list of colors, you’ll find an interesting mix of traditional neutral shades and a few bold ones that add a modern touch to a room that needs some sprucing up.
Know How to Use Bright White
Bright white has been used in homes for many years to create a neutral background on which homeowners can use a range of color schemes as they decorate. White naturally reflects light, and it is wonderful for helping to brighten up a darker room. Keep in mind, however, that this neutral hue can look overly stark if you aren’t careful. Painters will sometimes recommend painting the trim in these rooms a complementing shade to keep the room from feeling too sterile.
Soften the Wall’s Impact With Black
Today’s more modern shades of black look less like doom and gloom and more like an elegant palace. While too much black can make a room look tiny and dark, the right shade and paint application can create an optical illusion. Painting an accent wall or two can make it look like those walls recede compared to the lighter colors on the adjoining walls. This fools the eye into thinking that the darker walls head off into the abyss so that the room feels more spacious.
Walk the Middle Line With Soft Gray
In a world where nothing is black and white, you can’t go wrong with gray. Stone and steel gray shades are among the top trending colors for residential painting this year, and they help you to take advantage of the qualities that everyone loves about other neutral shades. Gray works beautifully as an accent color, or you can paint the walls and ceiling to extend the line of the walls through an adjoining kitchen.
Generate a Sense of Calm With Blue
Close your eyes for just a moment, and imagine that feeling that you get when you stare up at the sky or out at the ocean. Blue has the effect of making a room feel wide open yet at the same time comforting. Pale blue is the best option for lightening up the walls in a smaller living room, but you can also use navy blue in the same way that you would use black.
Play With Pastels
Lavender, blush pink and moss green are all potential pastel shades that add interest to an otherwise plain old living room. Using these shades as an alternative to white shows off your creative sense of style without being too harsh. Pastels are light and airy, which is exactly what you want when your living room feels cramped.
Are you interested in seeing how certain colors can transform your living room? Give us a call today at 831-269-2837 to start planning your home’s color scheme.