Starting from scratch...almost

[AndrewM]

Well, in about 24 hours I'll be done with all the legal/paperwork side of buying a house, and with about a week and half till the movers come in to put all my furniture in the house it's time to paint. But here lies the problem...I'm one of those super-computer nerds and have absolutly no sense of color schemes, decorating, etc.

So the room I'm going to be putting the ol' home theater/music system is (to add to the whole problem) shaped just plain wierd. The room is about 14-15ft wide, useable 17ft deep (another 10ft to the wall because of the staircase) and the worst part, the damn ceiling is 2 stories tall (I'm figuring a good 20-25ft). So when the room is basically taller than it is width or height wise (at least visually), so this leads to some problems with choosing a paint color. I fear if I go with to dark of a color it's going to make the room look even taller.

Some items in the room, the wall unit is black with dark grey spots (a granite wanna-be laminate). The seating right now is a dark hunter green, but that may change to black (I have a weakness for dark hunter green). The speakers are going to be black and cherry (light reddish tone), the DVD racks will be the same cherry. The floor is tile, and is an off-white/semi-beige like color, and I don't remember the grout color (but I think it's pretty light, there wasn't any big contrast).

So anybody have any ideas? I was thinking along the lines of a medium to light taupe color may bring a little something more to the room than just the basic white.

Andrew

[George Bellefontaine]

Hi, Andrew,
It seems to me that taupe may be a good choice.If this is going to be a multi use room you are not going to want things too dark. Hopefully Susan Steele will jump into this post. She recently redid her room making it more HT friendly and it looks beautiful.She has a good feel for color co-ordination,too. What will you be using for video ? I'm also curious as to what kind of a speaker array you have and how you will meet the challenge of this two story high ceilings.




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[Susan]

Andrew,
You didn't say how light or dark this room is...are there a bank of window along one wall?? A lot fo times these two-story rooms are really bright from two-story windows....if this is the case, go with a medium to darish taupe..don't be afraid to get some good "suede-y" color on that wall...it makes the dark greens and blacks really pop, and coordiniates well with cherry. If it is a dark room, then stay in the mediums. My best advice is to not go a pale taupe...it comes off as blah-beige. I wimped on my own and don't like it, but on my client's homes I've learned to go darker for more contrast and it gives these rooms a warmer, cosier feel.

Also, is this to be your HT room? Does it already have good shades?
Susan

[AndrewM]

Well, I've thrown 3 different colors on the walls so far and I think we've settled on one called "Alpine Lace" by Behr, it's probably a notch up from the blah-beige, at least compared to the other colors we tried out (way to light), but it's still a little on the lighter side. The problem I can see with using a darker color is that it's going to really shrink up the room, and with the wierd dimensions (taller than depth/width) it could look a little wierd. Plus when you are standing right in the living room there is no easy transition to the other rooms (which are much darker), so the "great room", dining room, staircase and upstairs hallway all kind of work together. It's a wierd layout in that it's fairly open.

The "great room" with the tall ceilings does have a lot of windows, and will be fairly bright but that can be controlled with some shades, and I may not even put the HT in there, since we have a nice formal dining room (which we'd never use) that may work out better for the whole setup, and will certainly sound better than that echo chamber of a living room.

Andrew