Hello - I am in the process of helping my friend paint the livingroom/dinning room of her new home. The livingroom and dinning room are only separated by a very chunky arch way. My dilema is this: She wants to use a dark chocolate brown as an accent color in both rooms with a creamy white as her base color. We have already painted the far wall of the dinning room the dark chocolate brown. I'm having a problem deciding if we should paint an adjacent wall in the dinning room the dark brown also, or paint all the other walls of the dinning room a creamy white. I know that if I paint the wall opposite the brown (which would be the arch way) the room will start to feel really small. I have attached a rough floor plan with some notes for you to look at and get an idea of the layout and size. Thanks in advance for your help. living room/dinning room layout ( photo / image / picture from Kattersw's Garden ) [/img]
It seems to me that you would need to balance the two rooms with the dark chocolate, or the eye would immediately be drawn to the accent wall. That's what you want in the dining room, but you don't want people in the living room to be drawn to that far dining room wall without something to balance it in the living room. Would you be able to paint the slanted wall by the entry in the living room chocolate as well? Perhaps a compatible color between the other two colors in shade would be useful somewhere, or you could pepper the chocolate in (with accent accessories, window coverings, furniture or paint) to balance out the rest of the dining/living room combination. I'm sure your hard work will pay off. I do just what you are doing when I'm stumped. I ask, research, then it comes to me!
Thanks for your response. Just as clarification, the slanted line is not a wall (sorry about that!) I put it there to show where the living room carpet started and the entry way tile ended. We had planned to accent a wall in the living room also with the chocolate brown, but I wasn't sure which one. I was afraid that if I painted the small wall in the living room adjacent to the entry way (directly across from the dark chocolate wall in the dinning room) the two rooms might shrink. Any other ideas?
Well its her house! Sometimes all you can do is shake your head! We recently renovated a client's house and the painter did a dark chocolate wall for part of the living/dining room and my husband put up a piece of molding between the two sections. The painter painted it white and it looked really good and defined the room well.
