The Best Paint Colors for Small Rooms

Yellow can make a small room seem bigger.

In many ways, painting a small room is much less of a headache than painting a larger room. Larger rooms require more paint, which costs more money, and in the end, if you don't like the overall effect it's expensive and tedious to fix. You can also paint small rooms strategically so that they appear bigger.

Sharp, striking colors

Painting the walls a sharp, striking color is one way to take attention away from the room's size and put the focus on the color. For example, if you paint a small living room a serene Mediterranean blue, the color will unify the space and blur the space's boundaries, making the exact size unclear. Consider painting the space in bright sharp, contrasting colors. The interesting contrast that the colors create distracts from the size of the room and enhance the openness of the space. Alternatively for a room that people are only in fleetingly, such as a foyer, you could paint a bold, daring color, like fire engine red.

Cheerful colors

Cheerful and bright but soft colors make small rooms seems bigger and help to get you going. Consider painting a small kitchen, bathroom or home office a cheerful, sunshiny yellow. A minty green shade is cooler and will give the room a serene edge. Bear in mind that when you paint the walls one of these colors, you should contrast it with a darker or lighter color. For example, a dark brown desk can harmoniously contrast the minty green walls or a white kitchen table can contrast the sunshiny yellow walls.

Focal Wall

In a small room, you can strategically paint one wall a darker or deeper shade that is dramatically different from the other colors in the room. In this manner, the darker wall will appear to recede, creating the illusion of space. An alternative to give the illusion of space and create a sense of texture, paint vertical stripes three to five inches wide and paint the stripes in alternating, but similar, colors. For example, you could alternate a darker and lighter shade of beige or cream, or alternate mint green and evergreen.

References

• House Beautiful: Color for Small Rooms
• This Old House: 3 Small Spaces, 9 Bold Color Ideas
• HGTV: Color Rulese for Small Rooms
• Las Vegas Review Journal: Paint makes small room look larger