How to Make a Small Space Feel Bigger With Paint

In the quest for an ideal living space, many of us find ourselves navigating the challenges of limited square footage. Whether you reside in a cosy apartment or a charming tiny house, maximising every inch of space is essential to creating a comfortable and inviting home.

In the following tips by professional painters and decorators working for Fantastic Services, you will find the ideas to help you make your room feel bigger.

Colours that Make a Room Look Bigger

Colours play a big part in the size perception of a room, so it is important you pick the right ones for maximum effect. Neutrals are the safe way to go for a paint job whenever you want to give a more spacious feel to your room. They work very well with the layout of your room and natural light and create an optical illusion of it being bigger than it is.

If your room receives enough natural light, you could easily go with darker and cooler colours. Warm colours are fantastic if you want to make it cosier. When it comes to a room with little light exposure, consider going for something lighter and brighter.

You don’t have to limit your choice of colour to just neutrals, though. Pale, dark blues, soft black, taupe, beige, pale lavender, and off-white are just a few fantastic options you can use to make your small room look bigger.

Combining Light and Colour

All painters know that dark colours tend to absorb light, while lighter ones are reflective, and now so do you. You are going to need sufficient natural or artificial light to draw out the effect of the colour you have selected for a larger-space perception.

Great lighting can easily make up for darker hues, so you should not be afraid of going for them. Adding a glossy coating to your dark walls or ceiling will make them more reflective and add depth to your rooms. If you don’t feel like using neutrals for your paint job, yellow and red tones make a great option. They work in rooms with less light since they are warmer, but blue could still work if you want to keep on a cooler vibe.

If you find that natural light is insufficient in your room, you can compensate by placing mirrors. A mirror wall can do wonders for a room with low amounts of light and will open up more options to use darker tones while bringing more life to lighter ones.

Using Contrasting Paint Colours

Contrasting colours can play a big role in making your space look bigger, as you can use them to set up your floor-to-ceiling curtains as a focal point, for example. Using painted elements or furniture as a contrasting accent is very beneficial for a more interesting and spacier room. Striping your walls or highlighting a wall, your ceiling or floor in a completely or slightly different colour, as long as done in moderation, can do wonders for making a room seem bigger than it is.

Adding Height To a Room With Paint

Vertical stripes can make that mission very easy to achieve. You could even be bold about it and paint the stripes on the ceiling and connect them in its centre.

Another way to make your room seem taller is by using lighter tones for your floor and ceiling. Whether it’s in the form of tiles, a parquet or a carpet, apply lighter hues to the floor and the ceiling, while your walls should keep a darker tone.

Creating Depth In a Room With Paint

Depending on the amount of natural light in the room, there are several things you can do to add depth to it. For one, you can choose a darker palette for your room if there is sufficient light. Play around with lighter and darker shades to create a bit more contrast. This also adds more depth to the room.

You could potentially use one of the walls and add a darker tone to it for an additional depth effect. In rooms with more than enough light, you can take the opposite approach and instead use a lighter hue on just one of your walls. Using horizontal stripes is another way to elongate or widen your quarters.

Painting Techniques That Will Make a Room Look Bigger

There are many painting techniques that handymen and professional decorators use to make your rooms look larger than they already are. Some of them include:

Colour drenching is a painting technique to make everything in a room flow together, with as few visual lines as possible. The result is the optical illusion of a much larger space. It involves painting the walls, doors, floor and ceiling in similar tones of the same colour, as well as using similar hues for your furniture. You can easily use this technique to create a focal point in your room, too.

Using a reflective finish and paint is another efficient painting technique for making your room appear bigger. Metallic, semi-gloss, high-gloss and satin coating will harness any light flowing in your room and amplify it to create an illusion of a larger space. Adding tiles, mirrors, and other highly reflective objects is advisable to maximise the effect. Lighter colours are especially effective since they are reflective by default.

If you make your surfaces seem farther away, in a way you have succeeded at making your room bigger. Receding colours achieve just that and are one of the painting techniques an experienced handyman can use to make your small room feel bigger. Pale colours of green and blue hues are popular “receding” choices, recommended by professional painters and decorators to make a room bigger.

Striping is another painting technique that adds more optical volume to your rooms. You can use vertical stripes, which will make your room look taller, while horizontal ones will give your room more depth and make it look more spacious.

Painting the Ceilings

Choosing a lighter hue for your ceiling, compared to that of the walls, is the best way to make it seem much taller than it actually is. Shades of white are a safe option when it comes to a paint job for a taller ceiling, especially if their undertone is similar but softer than your walls. Yet, you don’t need to settle for white if this is not how you envision your room design. You could opt to paint your ceiling in a lighter shade of the colour you used for the walls, utilising the colour-drenching technique, too.

Conclusion

Now that you know what colours to use and how to mix them, you just need to find the time and patience to put everything into practice. Remember, the key is to experiment, strike a balance, and let your creativity flow. With a little paint and a touch of imagination, you can transform your small space into a haven that feels spacious, welcoming, and uniquely yours. So, don’t be afraid to pick up that paintbrush and embark on the journey of making your small space feel bigger than ever before!