A fireplace adds a cozy quality to a room, but it can make decorating and choosing the right paint color difficult.
It's important to note that the red brick fireplace in your living room doesn't have to match your walls exactly, but you should take it into account when choosing a paint color. Ideally, the colors of your walls will make your fireplace seem just right in your living room--like the room itself is an integrated whole. Or alternatively, the colors of the walls will make the fire place pop, emphasizing the focal-point quality that the fireplace should naturally have.
Instructions
1. Throw out any ideas of painting the walls dark red, navy blue, or eggplant purple. Red walls would be very difficult to match to the color of the fireplace, and if you did succeed, this would only serve to camouflage the fireplace. Navy simply wouldn't look right because it's a cool color that doesn't have much of a relationship to dark red on the color wheel. And finally, purple and dark red are an analogous color pair; the low-contrast quality that dark purple and dark red have together might make the room seem too dark and drab.
2. Look for colors that have a relationship to dark red on the color wheel. Warm colors, such as red, orange, gold, will match the warm quality of the fireplace. Consider copper or a golden brown pumpkin pie color. Alternatively, sage green--the complement of red--will recede into the background, allowing the dark red fireplace to come forward and become the focal point of the room.
3. Match the colors to the other furnishings in the room. Take into account the size of the room and quality of light in the room. This is as important--if not more important--than matching the color of paint to the fireplace. Smaller rooms will look better with lighter, brighter colors. Larger rooms with a lot of natural daylight can support darker, richer colors.
4. Narrow your paint choices to a few favorites and then paint a sample of each color over the fireplace. The sample paint square should be painted close enough to the fireplace so that you can compare the dark red brick to the paint color, and it should be painted large enough so that you get a good feel for what the paint color will look like when it's covering your walls. Look at the paints in all qualities of light--during the day and at night--to decide which is the best color for your room.
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