need help in picking fireplace mantel color

13 years ago

I am replacing my 1950 fireplace with a gas insert, and I am also replacing the mantel. I am having difficulty in picking a color for the new mantel. The fireplace is on the one wall in my living room which is not painted, but which is made up of stained wooden planks. They are stained a reddish brown. No pics available, sorry! but I found something close on google images, which is described as Brazilian redwood. I am just completely flummoxed on what color or stain would look good against that wall. The rest of the living room is painted in Benjamin Moore greenmount silk. My furniture is mostly maple, floor is oak. I was thinking of painting it black, as my window sills are black slate, but don't know if that would just look like a big blob of black against that wall. I also have to pick out tile for the fireplace surround and hearth, but I figure I better pick out the mantle color first.

Thanks.

Abbey

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Comments (3)

magnaverde
13 years ago
Hi Abbey.

AS you can imagine, it's pretty hard to give specific advice--as opposed to talking about decorating concepts in general--without some visuals to go by, but maybe somebody else will chime in with the specifics once you can get some pictures up. Until we get those, we're trying to play catch without a ball.

In the meantime, we can talk generalities. While a perfectly coordinated room where everything matches everything else can be nice, it's usually a lot more intersting when a room has a bit of contrast. In your room, it sounds like wood planks are doing what, in another house, a different color paint might do: creating an accent wall. There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about accent walls, but their period of biggest popularity was half a centurty ago, right about the time of your house.

But there's a difference between a room in which one wall features a different color or a different material and a room in which one wall looks like it came from a different house. Be careful.

Your challenge, then, is to somehow relate the redesigned fireplace to the rest of the room. That eliminates black. Painting it the same green as the rest of the room would relate it better to the other three walls, but then it would look weird against the roughness of its own wall. So let's set aside the fireplace color for the moment and concentrate on the hearth and the surround and see how we tie them to the rest of the room.

What I would probably do--and which of the approaches I took would depend on the syle of furnishings in your room--is look for something in a green that relates to the color of your other walls. Maybe it's slabs of green slate with all its natural texture. Maybe it's green-glazed handmade tiles. I've seen some in tile showrooms that had a beautifuly soft matte sheen, with the varying depth of color that comes with handmade products. Maybe it's thick glass slabs enameled on the back to get a celadon color. Maybe its one-inch glass tiles in several pale greens. Maybe it's enameled brick the color of Fannie May Mint Meltaway candies. The stuff is still out there, fifty years after it was popular. It could be lots of things. At any rate, once you pick out whatever it is, you find a much darker paint for your mantel, one that's somewhere along the color line between the green of the hearth & the brown of the wood wall.

If the wall is really dark, maybe the fireplace is lighter than the wall. If the wall is lighter, the paint should be a draker version of that in-between color.

At any rate, what you don't want is a true black, even though you'll probably get that suggestion a lot. In an all-green room the resulting contrast would be striking. But with two different wall materials already in play, you don't want such a major piece in yet another color, one which doesn't relate to anything else. There's contrast, and then there's chaos.

Regards,
Magnaverde.
abbey_cny
Original Author
13 years ago
Magnaverde, Thanks so much for responding to my post. I knew it would not be easy without a photo, but I have no way to take one at the moment, so I thought I would risk asking a question and see if I got any help. I have lots to think about now, and hopefully I will find the right color.
Thanks again.

Abbey
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