The scenario is this: you want to paint your hallway a fun, uplifting colour (or a warm, serene one), but don’t necessarily want the colour to continue the whole way up the stairwell and onto the landing and floors above. But where to cut it off? Surely you don’t just stop in the middle of the wall? Do you take it to the point where it is out of sight from the front door and then change colour? The options are seemingly endless and without clear instructions you may end up in a bit of a single-colour spiral. The same predicament arrives when trying to figure out how to paint a door – which sides of the door should you paint without affecting the scheme on the other side of it? Painted staircases, too, might perplex someone who doesn’t want to continue the paint onto the landing, or know whether to incorporate the skirting too. Even a stair runner can bemuse those of us who don’t know where or how to cut it off or join it to the carpet on the landing. Knowing exactly what to do with details like this is what separates interior designers from amateur decorators, and thankfully, many are generous enough to offer some advice.
How to change hallway paint
Before diving into this first dilemma, there is one thing worth noting: most designers will agree that you should choose a colour for your hallway that you want to continue up the stairwell and on the hallway walls throughout the house. ‘I think having the core of the house the same helps everything else together,’ says the interior designer Tiffany Duggan. That being said, it is not a hard and fast rule. If you have fallen in love with a particular colour for your hallway but don’t want to continue it up the whole of the house, you will need to find a natural place to end it. The least natural, says Chloe Willis, Associate Director at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, would be ‘in the middle of a flat wall’, and so for Chloe the best place to swap from one colour to another is a corner. The rule is that ‘you should not be able to see where the colour changes from the front door,’ she says. ‘Choose a corner on the first floor or the first landing that you come to, and importantly make sure it is an inside corner (that’s to say, not one that juts out, but the acute angle)’.
Tiffany Duggan is always looking for architectural details that can provide a useful break in a space, which for her offers a natural transition point between finishes or materials. She points out that many classic Victorian terraced houses were built with an archway between the entrance hall and the stairway area beyond it. For Tiffany this is the perfect point at which to swap wall finishes: ‘if we are choosing an expensive wallpaper and don’t want to have to cover the whole stairwell and hallways in it we will often use this point as the transition point, after which we use paint on the rest of the spaces,’ she explains.
Which sides and edges of a door frame should you paint?
A question that often does the rounds concerns painting doors, specifically how to do it so that the colour on one side does not interrupt the scheme on the other side of the door. ‘People often get worried about this but it’s simple,’ says Tiffany. ‘When the door is closed, everything you see should be painted the colour of the room you’re in and vice versa, and the edges should be painted the colour of the side that the door opens into’. It certainly does sound simple, though there are additional considerations to bear in mind. For a truly harmonious look, Tiffany advises painting the edges of the door the same colour as the skirting of the room that it is opening into. ‘You just have to give some consideration to those colours being seen together and as long as they are friends then it’s absolutely fine’.
What is the neatest way to install stair runners?
The transition between whatever floor covering you have chosen for your stairs and the floor above it can be a tricky one to navigate. In some circumstances, you will be transitioning from stair runner to a different type of floor – be it carpet, tiles or wood. In other instances, it is the other way around: with a swap from whatever is covering (or not covering) your stairs to a carpet on the landing at the top. In both, it is how you treat the top step that decides whether the transition is smooth and elegant or clunky and messy. ‘I take the stair runner up the last riser of the stairs, and then wrap the landing carpet over the edge of the top stair. If you don’t have carpet on the landings, you can still take your runner up the last riser, and finish it under the bullnose edge that your landing floor most likely has‘, advises the interior designer Lucinda Griffith.
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How do you neatly change from one type of flooring to another?
‘If you can manage it, try to keep the flooring the same on each level,’ advises Chloe. ‘It makes everything join together much more smoothly’. Lucinda agrees, pointing out that this can mean deciding what flooring is going where fairly early on in the job so the builders can ensure a continuous level. ‘You don’t have to know exactly what is going on the floor,’ she says, ‘just whether it is wood, tile, stone or carpet’. If you are not able to change the floor levels and are going to have a slight lift, Lucinda recommends installing a gently raked wooden threshold. ‘Ideally this would be the thickness of the door itself. It can help to soften the change and avoid you tripping every time you go through the door,’ she adds.
When it comes to making the switch between carpet and another floor, Chloe has a brilliant trick for making the transition a seamless one. ‘Find a nice threshold piece that can sit between the two different floors. If we are changing carpets we will often bind the edges of the whole carpet with a different colour trim, which acts as a nice finisher,’ she says.
How to transition between colours in two separate, but linked rooms?
This is a question that stumps the best of us. You probably want more than one colour in your house, but don't know how to link each one without it feeling clunky. There seem to be two main approaches: one involves knitting the colours together, the other involves breaking them up.
Scenario A calls for you to think carefully about how best to weave two colours together so that if you're able to see both rooms at the same time, the colours don't jar. This can be, as Tiffany puts it, by ‘sandwiching the lighter of the two colours between bold blocks of the darker colour, such as on the woodwork either side’, or, using textiles and other decorative elements, as is the preferred method of Lucinda Griffith. 'If you do want a very conscious link between the two, perhaps pick up one of the paint colours from the adjoining room in a lampshade or cushion in the one next door. Or it may be that your woodwork is continuous from one space to another,’ she says.
Scenario B requires you to find a way to break the colours up. Again, Tiffany turns to architectural details for this. 'Whether it’s an architrave, joinery, or an archway, these details can really help to make a clear break between colours,’ she says. In a recent project, she clad the archway between two rooms in mirror, neatly separating them and adding visual interest to the archway too. Another trick she has turned to is adding a third colour to the arch: ‘In sitting room recently I chose a dirty khaki colour for the architrave and the lining which is also the skirting colour in the room next door - having a different skirting and architrave colour looked cool from both sides and didn’t belong to one room or the other,’ she explains.
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How do you make banisters look considered?
Another part of the house that might seem small but which can have a huge impact is the staircase, specifically the banisters. The question ‘to paint or not to paint’ has certainly circumvented the minds of many renovators, and the answer is manifold. If you heed the advice of Tiffany, before deciding anything you should consider what you are working with. ‘If there's a nice wooden handrail already it might just need a bit of french polishing to be lovely, and it will age really well,’ she says. If you decide that paint is the way to go, Tiffany assures us that everything will look much more harmonious if you paint the newel posts (the chunkier posts at the bottom and top of the stairwell), they should be the same colour as the stringer (the horizontal piece of wood that forms the frame at the bottom of the stairs), which in turn should be the same colour as the skirting. ‘You often see the skirting on the wall side is a different colour to the stringer and the newel posts, and I have a real thing about it,’ she says.
