Sky's the limit: How to paint any ceiling in your home

We show you how to solve common problems in room proportion and explore ways to fix them as inexpensively and easily as possible

Fill that vacant space offered by a lofty ceiling. Picture: iStock

Do you feel bowed down under a low ceiling or over-powered by towering metres in a high echo chamber? 

Low ceilings and high ceilings can be equally and oddly unsettling.

Let's take a look at the most common problems in room proportion; exploring proven ways to fix the look, with the least expense in a decorative renovation.

Low ceilings

Starting with the low-down on cramped ceiling height. The measurement 2.4m has long been the minimum recommendation for standard ceiling height for habitable rooms in building regulations.

It’s not outright illegal for the room to be a little lower, but it’s not regarded by surveyors as best practise in practical or architectural terms.

Elephant's Breath by Farrow & Ball is applied here over panelled walls. 

This suggested measurement was largely to do with standard stud-wall heights, and ventilation requirements — sensible healthy cubic metres for family homes.

New houses are more likely to boast even 2.6m ceiling heights only in the lowest reaches of box rooms and bathrooms.

Less overhead air space is really more common to ill-conceived self-builds, vintage 20th-century homes and period houses, some of which may even have false ceilings inserted from the mid-1900s, to make the spaces potentially easier to heat. 

With 2.4m high walls in, say your master bedroom, adding a thick underlay and carpet, the precious topography, that feeling of range, can be yanked down a further couple of centimetres. 

In any smaller room, ensure the air quality is being managed with sufficient, refreshing, air exchanges via trickle vents or mechanical ventilation (crucial for bedrooms where you’re prone with the door and windows sealed shut).

Upward thrusting or gentling climbing, use florals to push your ceiling heavenward. Gosford wall mural by Laura Ashley.

Aesthetically, we can, to some extent, throw back the ceiling with slim grifts.

This will suggest more visual room to breathe, while preserving the cosy, womb-like feeling that lower ceilings can actually offer.

First, let’s address a common intruder with this challenge. Hovering around your ears, central pendants are difficult to swing from a low ceiling and look ghastly clamped to the plaster.

Consider losing them altogether in favour of floor, wall, and table lights.

Traditional fixes for a hobbit room include, long, sweeps of one colour curtains, right to the ceiling and neatly reaching the floor (without pretentious pooling). 

That piece of wall across the top of most curtains, running side to side is not only visually busy, but breaks the wall up into more interrupting sections, bringing the room down even lower to the eye.

Built-in tall cupboards read as lofty, vertical columns, and striped wallpaper will also guide the eye upward. If stripes make you queasy, look for tall columns of biophilic foliage and flowers on a pale ground colour, clambering skyward.

Scale

Another conjurer’s trick, is to remove any detailing giving away the room’s scale — dado rails, and even deep skirting (paint it to match the walls otherwise). Having done this, keep the focus low, by adding bold colours and accessorising at reasonably shallow levels on shelves and surfaces.

Here Bright Skies by Dulux is used to throw back a low ceiling, taken a third of the way down the walls, while Cardamom Pod from its Greenhouse look-book adds warmth and character in this contemporary bedroom.

Skirting

Skirting can be taken out altogether if you’re doing a renovation if the attention to detail in the final plaster or skim is superbly executed.

Juxtaposition low, long lean furniture against what appears to be soaring walls. Low-backed furniture and headboards, leave a bigger ratio of what appears to be generous runs of wall above them.

Colours

Painting the ceiling white or a paler colour will offer a taller effect, as will up-lighters trained to diffuse over the top reaches of the wall and scatter light softly over the ceiling.

Rails and panels

If you have a picture rail in your period home, take that ceiling colour down to it. The most space-enhancing colours you can use in most situations — white, off-whites, and cleansing rain greys.

All that said, you can use two colours on the walls, just keep whatever you choose in a darker shade on the lower part of the wall — for instance, if you haven’t been able or willing to prise off the dados or have gorgeous period cornice detailing.

This room set for Annie Sloan shows how the walls being staged in low pictures have made this bathroom in a period home instantly more comfortable .

False panels — created using cheap lengths of timber bead, glued or tacked into place — are a superb budget cheat for character walls, and making them significantly taller than they are wide, they will toss back the ceiling too.

Use this cheat to frame up artwork, mirrors (look up a “pier mirror” if you’re into vintage) and other collections, again kept a little lower on the wall than expected in a loftier room.

Tall or too tall?

When is tall, too tall? There are certainly spaces which seem echoing and cavernous in the worst way. With hard flooring, you can hear that tall, stately ceiling coming before you even see it. 

Still, high ceilings crank the room open, and with the right glazing, this allows light to reach further into deep, distant reaches.

Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) advised that a room should be as high as it is broad. He wasn’t describing an elevator shaft.

Complaints of ceilings being too high generally revolve around small rooms and conduit areas, with creepy, out of proportion ceiling heights.

Luxury

Where lower ceilings deliver enclosure and calm, high ceilings including cathedral double heights spell grandeur, luxury, and spaciousness. We are unlikely to want to interfere with those prestigious, proven qualities.

Where the proportions are off, (with skinny going on the floor and galactic ceiling) corridors and smaller intimate rooms can lose that domestic hug.

More volume in cubic metres demands more kilowatts of heating. The room doesn’t just look bigger — it is physically bigger and could be inefficient to manage if the heat is all hanging around your ceiling rose. 

If the room feels cold and unwelcoming, are you sure it isn’t a climate issue rather than an aesthetic conundrum? 

If we’re hitting 20C to 21C in the main rooms, and 18C in the hallways, we can go on to make softly nuanced changes to otherwise cosy things up a bell-jar.

By flipping our simple paint hack used for stumpy rooms, and taking a darker shade to the ceiling compared to the walls, a far-away ceiling will appear ever-so-slightly lower. Again you can use this on the ceiling and above that picture rail to further pull the ceiling back towards the floor.

Paint

The alternative to this is to paint your chosen wall colour to a comfortable height (picture rails are perfect), suggesting that’s where the walls end.

The ceiling can even stay white. It’s an eccentric approach, but our mind somehow processes it.

Cutting the walls across with two tones, shortens them as we visually explore each area individually side to side.

Similar lamps, Linby Grady, €109.90, lights.ie. Picture: iStock.

The second fix is woodwork — skirting (including shadow gaps with or without lighting), dados, picture rails and cornice work will all splice up and reduce the visual power of the cliff-face of very high walls.

Here, those ceiling lights on chains or cables that we disparaged for a low ceiling will inhabit and gentle an out-of-reach void just as it would a stairwell.

Look into single-suspension lights and staggered height sets.

Artwork

Artwork can be brought together in arrangements, higher than they are broad, to again tame all that yawning space — but choose pieces with muscular proportions, that can be seen fully, even when hung slightly above your eye level while standing.

Alternatively, bring the arrangements down to a comfortable, quite low level where you are seated or say reclining in the bath.

Down-lighters set on dark, moody walls with a relatively dark, drenched ceiling, will leave the upper reaches in gloom — all but disappearing after dark.

This “tenting” effect can deliver the atmosphere of a dissolving infinite night sky. Completely magical.