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Home Decorating

On the topic of dark-painted interior doors

12 years ago

We're painting our kitchen/family room, which comprises about 1/2 of our entire first floor. Almost all of the doors on the first floor are in this space. There are only two that are not -- our front door, which is stained oak, and the door between the living room and the sunroom, which is a glass/mahogany wood door. In the kitchen/family room area, there are 2 exterior doors (mostly glass), a closet door, a bathroom door, and 2 sets of pocket doors that are rarely closed. The walls will be either Raccoon Hollow or River Gorge Gray. Trim is Natural Wicker (creamy off-white). Should I paint all the doors the darkest color on the "strip" of the wall color? One of them is like a very dark green-khaki sort of color, the other would be a very dark gray-green. Not black, but a similar effect, maybe.

When we originally did this addition, I did paint the pocket doors the darkest color on the strip from the wall color (walls are Cheyenne Green, I forget the name of the door color) and I like it, but this would involve painting a few more doors. I figure since we're painting, we're going to make them all the same -- either all match the trim, or all painted a color.

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Comments (3)

sweeby
12 years ago
I love our dark doors -- would do them again in a heartbeat... I vote for the darkest color on the swatch.
babs711
12 years ago
I was the one that brought this up (or revived this topic) a few weeks ago initially. It's been my thought all along that we would paint our interior doors for our build either BM Chelsea Gray or Dolphin (leaving all trim white).

When I spoke with our builder today, he pointed out the few rooms where we didn't do the eight foot doors as they weren't high traffic rooms. Yet you can see some of these doors from public spaces even though they're inside rooms (a few closets, the laundry that's in a vestibule entry, etc). Our plan was to go with a lower door height and do a molding transom to go up to eight feet. I've seen it done and it looks neat and intentional. His concern is that the dark doors will emphasize that we used 6'8" doors in these spaces. So now I'm hesitant. Any thoughts there guys?? I have about a week to figure this out. And now I'm bummed because I hadn't thought about this before. Walking through with the walls and just the openings, you don't notice any difference.
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User
12 years ago
I don't think it will make a bit of difference, babs. The dark doors actually make them look much further away (a perspective trick in drawing) and it would be difficult to really "tell" how high they are because of that. I would at least try painting one of them dark, you may find the dark color actually makes the seem taller because they seem further away.

Sueb20, I spoke with our interior designer today on a different matter and told him I had painted our doors....he was delighted! He's having clients' doors painted in the room color with 50% more pigment in the paint and is loving those results.

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