Your Ceiling Can Be the “Fifth Wall” for Decoration
By Bill Primavera
The Home Guru
As Published in The Examiner, The Putnam Examiner and The Yorktown Examiner
In the theatre, there is the “fourth wall,” referring to that imaginary wall that separates performers from the audience. In our homes, we have a fifth wall that a stage set is normally missing, the ceiling. Most people prefer to have the ceiling retire to anonymity by safely painting it white, but considering that the ceiling covers more space than any of the other walls, why should it be banished from the realm of possibility for decoration?
There are so many ways to create dramatic ceiling effects to enhance the overall decoration of a room. My epiphany about ceiling decoration came when I was in college, majoring in Art History, and visited the home of one of my art professors. His living room ceiling had been textured in different shades of white and off-white, some very shiny with a shellac finish and others dull, all patched into an interwoven paint pattern. It created an exciting visual element to the room, yet was not intrusive.
I could only store that information in the back part of my mind while I lived as a renter during my first couple of years in New York, but when I bought my first home in Brooklyn Heights, the possibility of the ceiling returned to me when an artist tenant painted his bedroom ceiling a pleasant yellow and his kitchen ceiling a battleship grey.
Possibilities were extended still further when friends invited us to their mid-19th century brownstone that featured 12 ft. ceilings on the first floor. Their parlor ceiling had been painted as a faux sky of light blue and fluffy clouds. It was like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel minus God and Adam.
My first venture into ceiling decoration was a dumbed-down version of that when I moved to Westchester and painted my bedroom ceiling a light cerulean blue. The choice matched the blue in the room’s wallpaper that also employed a medium green and beige in its color palette. The blue ceiling lent a more coordinated tone to the overall look of the room and tended to make the ceiling appear higher.
As an aside, there is a much simpler way to create height in a room with a low ceiling. Simply paint the ceiling the same color as the side walls, but choose it 2 or 3 shades lighter than the wall color. The ceiling will visually lift higher.
While I felt avant garde in painting a ceiling blue, consumer taste in ceiling treatment, especially in the upscale market, passed my meager effort with warped speed.
During the boom years of the real estate market, builders wanted to create as many upgrades as they could to satisfy the wishes of status-seeking clients and to get a greater return on each new house. Suddenly custom ceiling treatments were the new frontier of luxury living, from elaborate crown molding and tray ceilings with recessed lighting to coffered ceilings, wood paneled ceilings, and modern ceilings with varying heights and planes. Even the center medallion came back after an absence of almost 100 years.
A wallpapered ceiling is another exciting possibility, but if you’ve ever tried executing a fully papered ceiling as I have, you might want to plan physical therapy for the neck and back afterwards.
I must confess a love for wood paneled ceilings, and I’m seeing more of them employed in both new construction and in renovated homes, mostly in pine or cedar. But, here’s an important tip to remember: it’s best to get tongue and groove paneling pre-finished from the manufacturer because the product come finished on all sides. When unfinished wood is installed, painters can only finish the exposed surfaces of the wood and some unfinished wood can show when the tongue and groove shrink.
There is another revival in ceiling treatment coming in strong: decorative tin ceilings, a
quintessentially New York invention from the 1860s which shopkeepers used to cover cracked ceilings. They disappeared in WWII when metal grew scarce, but now many restaurants and other retail operations are using them again, and they’ve found their way into residential decoration. They can be left natural or with color coatings baked into the metal. It’s my desire to someday incorporate a tin ceiling into a kitchen or family room.
Not all of us can afford the expense of elaborate ceilings, but we can create many effects with just paint, perhaps with a small area of the ceiling treated in a different way for visual interest. That bedroom ceiling I painted blue was enhanced when I added a wooden canapé frame attached directly to the ceiling. Within the frame, I applied a blue, green and silver metallic wallpaper that glimmers down at us. I thought that was daring enough until I toured one home for sale some years ago and in the bedroom found a ceiling painted a rich purple, accented by a 6’ by 8’ foot mirrored section directly over the bed. Somehow I felt I had gathered more information than needed about the home’s special features.
One of my favorite ideas which I haven’t had the nerve to try yet, but will before I retire to an old-age home, is a striped ceiling motif, much like the interior of a circus tent. Hey, if it was good enough for the magnificent Le Cirque restaurant, think of the drama it could add to your dining room. And another of my dreams is to have a garden room ceiling with a painted trellis intertwined with an ivy stencil I’ve been saving for just that purpose for, oh, about 30 years.
I sometimes enjoy staring at a blank ceiling and imagining what it could be like when and if I get the time to decorate it. As far as our homes go, I guess it’s okay to have dreams that may or may not materialize. The ability to dream is the important thing about enjoying our homes as a hobby, as well as for living.
Bill Primavera is a Westchester, NY-based realtor ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and marketing practitioner ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) who can be reached for questions or comment directly at 914-522-2076.
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