What Color Should I Paint My Living Room?
Choosing a paint color for your living room is no simple decision. After all, it’s one of the rooms where we relax, kick up our feet, and help our house truly feel like a home. Painting your living room with the wrong color can disrupt the atmosphere of your home, make you feel less comfortable, and end up costing you hundreds if not thousands in paint, primer, and labor costs!
So how do you decide which color to paint the living room to make it a space you want to well…live in? There are several factors to take into consideration when choosing a color to paint your living room.
Light neutral colors among some of the most popular living room paint colors for their ability to open a space.
Atmosphere
To start, consider what type of atmosphere or mood you want to create in the room as well as your overall home. Colors can influence mood with colors like red increasing appetite and while cooler colors like blue and green have a calming effect.
If you want the living room to feel intimate or cozy, consider painting with earth tones like warm browns or soft yellows. To create a vibrant and lively space, bolder colors like deep blues and rich greens can give to room a creative and lively atmosphere.
Choosing the color to paint your living room also greatly relies on furniture, flooring, and personal style.
A large part of the atmosphere of your home has to do with your furniture as well. Making sure the wall color of your living room matches the style of your furniture can greatly help create flow and style in your living room.
Room Size & Lighting
However, it’s crucial to consider the size of the room, as well as the natural light and pre-existing light fixtures. A small, poorly lit room that’s painted with a darker color could make the room feel cagey and claustrophobic.
For a smaller room with limited natural light, soft grays or pastels can create a sense of brightness and open space. Lighter colors help to expand a space while darker ones help to close it off.
Using a combination of dark and light colors can give the illusion of depth, height, and width to your living room as well. For instance, painting the walls a darker color and the ceiling white will create the illusion of the room being stretched wide, while using all white will expand the room totally.
Sheen
Paint sheens also play an important role in choosing what color to paint your living room. The higher the sheen, the more light will reflect off of the walls. Paired with color, room size, and lighting, a paint’s sheen can drastically change the look and feel of a room.
Flat and matte are two popular sheens that can give living rooms a sleek and modern look but don’t hide imperfections or reflect light very well. Traditionally, flat and matte paints are the least stain resistant, but advances in paint technology have helped to develop washable flat and matte sheens.
Still, families with small children or pets often lean toward satin or eggshell sheens for added srubbability. Satin and eggshell are the most common sheen for living rooms, giving rooms a slight shine that isn’t too overbearing.
Semi-gloss and gloss are normally used for trim and baseboards for cleanability, and even give the illusion of added height if painted on the ceiling. Semi-gloss is also a great choice for bathrooms for its cleanability, but high gloss paints will show inconsistencies or imperfections in the drywall.
Ultimately, the right paint color for your living room should agree with your style, the size, and lighting of the room, and help develop the desired mood for a space you want to actually live in.
Tips and Tricks for Choosing the Right Color for Your Living Room
1. Buy Paint Samples
It’s very likely that the color swatch you loved in the showroom at Sherwin Williams will look different when it’s painted on your living room walls. While paint swatches match the true color of the paint, it’s no guarantee that the lighting in your living room will do the same. It’s quite often that natural or artificial lighting can bring out certain hues in the paint color that you didn’t see under the perfect showroom lighting. Buying a couple of quart-sized samples of paint and painting different areas in your living room will help you truly understand what looks good on your walls.
2. Hire a Color Consultant
There are experts at everything, and that includes people who know what color you should paint your living room. Color consultants are interior designers that take into consideration your room lighting, size, furniture, and desired atmosphere in order to come to a conclusion on the best color for you. Companies like Sherwin Williams have color consultants on hand that can even do their color consultations on a zoom call!
So What’s the Best Living Room Paint Color for You?
At the end of the day, your living room should be a space you want to live in and that means something different for everyone. When choosing a color to paint your living room, think about the size of the room, lighting, how groovy your couch is, and most importantly what you want the room to look and feel like! Oh, and we can paint it for you. Ultimate Property Services offers the best interior painting in the Austin, Texas area. You already did enough work deciding on the color, we’ll get rollin’ on the rest!
