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MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR HOME: COLOUR AND LIGHT

The whole look of your home can change tremendously simply by choosing the best possible combinations of light and dark colours for walls and ceilings. When decorating rooms, it is important to consider the visual impacts created. The whole effect can change; your choices of colour and light sources can make rooms appear larger or smaller. Next month we will be introducing another important factor: flooring type and colour.

Wall and ceiling colours
It may be stating the obvious, but it is important to remember that dark walls and ceilings make rooms look smaller. Light walls and ceilings make rooms look larger. What is perhaps less well known is that the following matches can visually "correct" the room's actual volumes:
- Dark ceiling with light walls: the room will look lower and wider because light walls give the impression of moving away from each other. This is an uncommon solution but one that can make the rooms with the high ceilings, typical of older homes, more welcoming.
- Dark walls with light ceiling: this is a more common solution. The ceiling will stand out more and the room looks taller, because the dark walls tend to attract each other.
- Light back wall and ceiling, remaining walls, dark: the light wall opposite the door makes the space narrower, deeper and higher.

Tricks and shades
If the problem is a room with too low a ceiling, one system is to paint the walls with a darker colour, stopping about 15/20 cm down from the ceiling.
Another technique is to choose wallpaper or other furnishing items such as curtains with vertical stripes and texture to create the illusion of added height. And to create an impression of depth and optical illusion? Colour type is a useful tool for correcting room dimensions. We use cold shades (blue, violet and green) to lengthen a room and warmer ones (yellow, red, orange) to make it shorter.

Light
For rooms with poor natural lighting, softer colours are a must.
Walls with windows should be finished in a light colour to avoid contrast with the light from the window. The wall opposite should be similar, so that it can reflect the light and spread it throughout the room.
Watch out for curtains that affect the chromatic quality of the rooms and contrasts between one room and the next. Going from a light room immediately into a darker one makes the second seem even darker than it really is. For artificial lighting, consider both the quantity and type of lights. Fluorescent lights require warm, decisive shades to correct their cold dominance; the opposite is true of incandescent lights.

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ON THE SAME TOPIC:

• 13/11/2009 COMBINING NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
• 04/11/2009 PAINTING THE WALLS: DO'S AND DON'TS
• 20/05/2005 THEATRICAL EFFECTS FOR THE WALLS
• 07/10/2004 NEW COLORS FOR THE KITCHEN WALLS