Paint Color in an Open Floor Plan

An open floor plan changes the question you are answering when you choose paint. In a house of separate rooms, each room is a box you can decide on by itself. In an open plan, the living room, the dining area, the kitchen and often the entry are one continuous space, and almost every wall is seen next to every other wall. A color that would be lovely in a closed room can feel disjointed when it stops abruptly halfway along a sightline.

Many of the newer homes in Eastlake and Otay Ranch are built this way from the start, and plenty of older tract homes in Santee and across San Diego have had a wall or two taken out in a remodel, leaving a space that is open but was never planned to be painted as one.

How do you make color flow through connected rooms?

Pick one main color for the walls that share the open space, and use the architecture to decide where anything else begins. Keep the ceilings one color, the trim one color, and the wall sheen consistent across the space. Variety then comes from walls that genuinely read as their own surface, not from switching colors wherever a room’s function changes.

Start from where you stand

Before thinking about colors, walk the space and notice what can be seen from where. Stand at the front door, at the kitchen sink, on the sofa and at the top of the stairs if there is one. Each of those spots has a sightline that takes in several walls at once. The walls that appear together from the places you spend the most time are the ones that have to work together.

This exercise usually shows that the kitchen, living and dining walls are one surface as far as the eye is concerned, even if you think of them as three rooms.

Where can a color stop?

The single most important rule in an open plan: change color only where there is a natural edge.

Good places to stop:

• An inside corner, where two walls meet and the line is crisp and shadowed.
• The edge of a doorway, archway or cased opening.
• A beam, soffit or bulkhead that divides the ceiling.
• A change in ceiling height, such as a vaulted living room meeting a flat kitchen ceiling.
• The far side of a hallway that leads away from the open space.

Places that look like a mistake:

• An outside corner, where a color change looks like it ran out of paint.
• Partway along a flat wall with no feature to mark the line.
• The middle of a continuous wall that runs from the living area into the kitchen.

If a long wall has no natural break, it keeps one color. That is often the deciding factor in whether a second color is possible at all.

Using more than one color well

Some homeowners want a little more variety than a single color gives. The ways that tend to work:

1. Same color family, different depth. Two shades from the same paint strip share an undertone, so they sit together calmly. The deeper one goes where it can stop at a clean edge.
2. An accent wall that is its own surface. A fireplace wall, the wall behind a dining table that is bounded by corners, or a wall recessed in an alcove. If it begins and ends at inside corners, it reads as intended.
3. The rooms with doors get the freedom. Bedrooms, a study, a powder room or a laundry can each have their own color, because you see them one at a time.

Light changes across one space

A long open room in San Diego is often lit very differently at each end: west-facing sliders throwing warm afternoon sun across the living area, and a kitchen tucked under a soffit that sees little daylight. One color can look warm and bright at one end and noticeably cooler and grayer at the other. That is normal and is not a reason to switch colors mid-wall. It is a reason to test samples in both places, in the morning and late afternoon, before deciding.

Coastal light on a gray June morning and inland light in a bright Santee afternoon will also shift the same color differently, so test in the season and the light you will live with most.

Ceilings and trim hold it together

In an open plan, the ceiling is usually one continuous surface with nowhere clean to change. Keep it one color and one flat sheen throughout. Trim, doors and baseboards should be one color and one sheen across the whole connected space, too; a different white on the kitchen baseboards than on the living room baseboards will show where they meet.

Keep the sheen consistent

Sheen is the choice most often overlooked, and it is hard to hide. If the living room walls are matte and the kitchen walls eggshell, the line between them can show in raking light even where the color is identical. Many people choose one washable finish for the whole open space so it reads as one surface. Both Dunn-Edwards and Sherwin-Williams make scrubbable matte and eggshell interior lines that suit kitchens and living spaces alike.

Let the fixed things lead

Cabinets, countertops, a tile or wood floor that runs through the whole space, and a stone fireplace are the largest colors in an open plan, and they are not changing. The wall color has to sit well with all of them at once, because in an open plan they are always seen together.

Ebenezer has a good eye for color and he will walk the space with you, look at where the walls can stop, and talk through what will flow. Read more about interior painting or ask for a free estimate for your open-plan rooms.