How painting your walls white transforms your home interiors 

White is fresh, uplifting, amplifies space in every direction and has a timeless elegance used in a period or new house

Dulux Blue Skies (its Colour of the Year 2022) teamed to a Brilliant (gallery style) White indicates a return to art deco chic.

WHITE is a classic shape-shifter and there are so many reasons it endures as a go-to. With a little planning, it’s (almost) impossible to go wrong with the pure stuff or one of its soft companion tints for walls.

It’s fresh, uplifting, amplifies square metres in every direction and has a timeless elegance used in a period or newly minted space.

If you are on a budget, from €6 a litre by the bucket, finding quality white paint will be far more economical than having a true colour mixed in a good acrylic recipe. With a white painted room with inoffensive flooring, you can swap out accessorising brights season-on-season in searing colours. White celebrates everything else in the room, most importantly the architecture. It’s a perfect companion that sings with every colour, loud or fainting, and anchors new neutrals. It can belt, block, or stand-alone.

Taking white to all surfaces is best limited to officer's quarters. The inclusion of comforting textures and a warmer bone white with yellow undertones takes the chill out of this room.

Those lovely planes, volumes, and shifts of direction in an open-plan space will emerge uninterrupted. Delicate shadowing delivered by natural ambient light alters white to mark out each independent wall. White is also less inclined to transmogrify to an unpalatable, soupy colour with LED or halogen lighting.

Architraves, plaster-work, florid marble fire surrounds — white politely gets out of the way of bold modern feature furnishings and every genre of second-fix detailing bringing them forward. Artwork, from inexpensive posters to unframed, impasto oils, has a new presence staged on pure white walls. If you want to focus acutely on a view, stick with a framing of white walls and blinds that retract right into the window reveals.

Still, treat white with respect as it does offer some complexity. A high white was and remains curiously formal. Deployed all over a pinched, dull room with few furnishings, it could prove sterile and strangely edgy. This is no blank contender or aesthetic cop-out.

This white room carries about six shadings from snowy to putty grey, due to the massive windows managed by versatile blinds. South-facing light can be glary. Try blue-based rain whites to dial it down.

Most architects pelt their career show-stoppers in snowy, highly reflective gallery-white. The cleaner the white, the more present it will be. You are more likely to elicit gasps with 3m-high drifts of rain-white in a room with soaring ceilings than in any other shade. Taken over floors, furniture, and melted over skirting, the stainless, all-white room is a profound challenge for even exquisitely behaved adults. With the subliminal message “Don’t touch”, it can be socially and visually frosty. We need to layer in some warmth and texture to avoid a shivering Space Odyssey.

Pets and kids? Do yourself a favour and leave white for porcelain tiling, and scrubbable paint finishes on walls and skirting.

The tender vocabulary of white, with the exception of the most ethereal, snow-white purity, are not just white, but a stained, white base with a tiny spoonful of impact-altering tint. Many interior decorators confidently make up their own favourite, signature white. In non-academic terms, you’re still looking for a colour or a suite of colours. Once you have any tint to the white, sample them with your “real” colours on the subject wall. You will have dozens of muted whites on colour scale cards in “dirty whites” to physically test. Each one will have minute characteristic differences to suit the aspect and atmosphere of every space. Discreetly different, off-whites should be treated as location-specific.

The loose families of white are warm whites, cool whites, and an unremitting “gallery” or brilliant white. With a yellow or ashes of roses undertone, your white can balance a slightly blue light from the north or west. Fleetwood’s Almost White and Vanished White are good examples of warming, creamy pink whites that will look still quite pure once up on the wall, With a touch of blue or green and grey, cool white can take the golden glow out of sunnier, south-facing areas without being frigid and uninviting.

Staying with Fleetwood, look at its cooler Designer White or Snowbound, popular rain-whites. Its offering of Pantone’s Bright White and the new White Alyssum are again cool and chic.

Warmer tones are generally best for rooms you spend a lot of time in, dependent on natural light. For Springtime romance, my choice would be Colourtrend Wedding Bouquet in its elite Historic Collection or any of its golden Palladian whites.

Sitting somewhere in the middle of cool and warm, Little Green’s Slaked Lime is an iconic neutral in a rich mineral white. 

The white kitchen remains a cool favourite for renovations and new fit-outs, and is a safe, future-proof investment. Aviano by Cash & Carry not only looks fantastic, but will throw light into every corner of even a challenging small galley, opening it right up.

In Farrow & Ball, try Skimming Stone #241 for a warm artisan white and its Wevet #273 for a hushed touch of cooling grey.

To find a really pure, unsullied white, use a piece of white A4 to make your comparisons in a painted test. Even emblazoned as “brilliant”, whites vary brand to brand. Pure white can produce eye-watering glare in a south-facing room with masses of glazing.

Test, test, test to dial that dazzle up or down. Don’t be led by the product name which titled “white” can grade into buttercreams, pastels and greys.

Benjamin Moore Lightning White is a charming primrose yellow, mrcb.ie. Where your plaster is less than perfect, pure and neutral whites will throw light out of shallow dings and depressions go for something with a slight sheen over a super matt to deploy this reflective trick. If the ceiling is oppressively low, marry an off-white to the walls with a brighter white to the ceiling, and vice versa if the ceiling is too lofty for your comfort in a skinny hall.

Contrast and contain determined colour with stark, white woodwork or increase the punchiness of softer mid-tones by combining them with pure white. Going off-white, take the maker’s lead, looking up their suggested groupings of compatible white shadings in the same warm or cool family, sometimes all you’ll need for a room with great bones and views to forever.

Test the colour on each wall of the room and against your favourite furnishings. Make a record of the colours you choose. Keep the tin, the colour card, the brand. Every colour including white will alter perceptively in both texture and colour under intense UV light, so slapping on an annual patchy fix to staining after several years simply won’t work. Where you do have to alter the wall colour, staying pale, the “wrong” white is just the right primer for a new top-coat.

There are few of us who can really pull off a black and white room with smoked glass and mid-century chrome framed furniture. Delivered full-on, its monochrome can read as dated and repelling. Try shadings of pale grey against stark white, with dramatic dark decorative moments, perhaps a faux-zebra or vast, genuine authentic cow-hide rug. Chill? You may even have to live in a room to realise there’s simply too much white glittering off every surface.

The good news is paint is relatively cheap for its covering power, and layering in the right pieces and tonal greys you can fix the polar desert in one day.

This year sees a trend towards one paint colour in varying textures from a diamond shine gloss to a powdery matt, another option for introducing a new dimension to your all-white dream. Tinted white walls with pure white woodwork mark a delicate approach for period homes.

In all-white treatments with even the skirting blotted out with white gloss, furnishings can appear to hover — somewhat sinister without a grounding floor shade. Don’t cling to decorating rules, test with real paint directly on the wall or lining paper, shuffle up those mood boards, and trust your eye.