Small Rooms Take Colour Better Than Large Ones

For about a decade the standard advice for a small room was to paint it white, keep the furniture low and add a mirror. The advice was repeated so often it stopped being examined, and it is mostly wrong. White does not make a small room bigger. It makes a small room a white small room, and in a north-facing space it makes it a grey one.

The thing that actually makes a small room feel cramped is not colour. It is the number of visible edges — where wall meets skirting, where skirting meets floor, where a bookcase interrupts a wall, where four different surfaces meet in a corner. Every edge is a boundary the eye registers, and a small room has the same number of edges as a large one packed into less space.

Why deep colour works

A dark or saturated colour dissolves edges. Paint the walls, the skirting, the window reveal and the door in the same deep tone and the corners stop announcing themselves. You lose the sense of exactly where the room ends, which is precisely the sensation people are trying to buy with white paint and not getting.

It also gives a small room a reason to exist. A tiny white spare bedroom reads as leftover space. A tiny bottle-green one reads as a decision.

Which rooms to try it in first

The cloakroom or downstairs loo. The traditional starting point, because it is small, nobody spends long in it, and the cost of being wrong is one afternoon.
A hallway. Counter-intuitive and extremely effective. Hallways are transitional, usually dark already, and a deep colour makes the rooms leading off them feel brighter by contrast.
A spare bedroom or study. Rooms used at specific times rather than all day take saturation well.
Not the main living room, first. Not because it will not work, but because it is the room you will look at most and the most expensive to repaint.

The rules that make it work

Take the colour everywhere. Walls, ceiling, skirting, architrave, radiator if you can. A deep wall colour with brilliant white woodwork reintroduces every edge you were trying to lose, and the contrast makes the room read smaller than it did in plain white.

Use a finish with some depth. Flat matt absorbs light and holds the colour; a modern eggshell on the woodwork stops it looking like a set. Avoid anything with a sheen on large wall areas in a small room — it will show every imperfection in the plaster at close range.

Then let the floor and one or two objects be the light things. A pale rug, a light timber piece, an unlined linen curtain. The contrast should be low and deliberate, not scattered.

If you cannot paint

Renting changes the calculation but not the principle. What you are after is fewer visible edges and lower contrast, and you can get most of the way there with textiles: a full-height curtain across a wall rather than just a window, floor-length in a colour close to the carpet, and larger pieces of furniture rather than several small ones.

The single biggest renter-friendly improvement in a small room is usually removing three small things and adding one large one. Our boho pages make the same argument from a different direction: layering works, scattering does not.

Common questions

Does this work in a room with almost no natural light?

Better than white does. A room with no daylight will never feel bright, so the choice is between a grey-looking white room and a room that has committed to being an evening room. Light it properly with lamps at low level and it becomes the best room in the flat.

What about very low ceilings?

Take the colour up onto the ceiling. It sounds like the opposite of what you want and it works: a defined white ceiling above a coloured wall draws a hard line at the exact height you are worried about. Removing the line removes the reminder.