Of the two, I would suggest the Paris Rain.

I would consider Not putting a plate rail in the LR. Plate rails were installed for storage and display in Dining rooms and Kitchen areas, or, in really old houses the "Hall" which was the room used for just about everything (which may explain why you see them in what seems to be the parlor of a really old house).

I know you see this type of thing in every room of the house in Pottery Barn catalogs and such, and its a neat place for display, but its really kind of counterintuitive to the place a plate rail "should be", at least in the public part of the house. (A high shelf can be a neat thing in a kid's room too, but in MBR, not so much).

Thanks for your input! Yeah you are right PB does feature that look often and it looks so great. I will tell you though the reasoning behind why I wanted to put the rail in there and then maybe you or someone else will have an alternate suggestion for me. Because the ceilings are 9 foot high and the layout of the house is so spacious and open, I think that having a solid color going from floor to ceiling will be too much. And also because I want to balance it with the dining room, I felt that I needed to break it up somehow. I don't like chair rails in living rooms (I think those are best in a kitchen, dining room, or bathroom), so thought that having a higher shelf rail on the wall would be a nice solution to help break up the color on the wall and balance it with the dining room. Is there possibly another treatment I can do with mouldings to help break up the wall without it looking choppy?

Your wall is only 9' tall and you feel that the whole wall painted one color would be too much? I don't think I quite understand the reasoning. Some of my walls in my LR are about 12' reaching on up to 15' and all the walls painted in the same color look beautiful. Why would they not?

Red

What about a wallpaper border at that level, with a co-ordinating paper above or below?

You could also plan to break things up with artwork.

KarinL

I would agree about not putting in chair rail. You dont want every room to look the same. I would put in crown moulding only. 9 foot ceilings are not too high to paint the room one color. Why dont you paint the living room Windham cream so it relates to the dining room.

Thanks everyone! I don't know...I had painted the downstairs bathroom all one color and hated it, but then we put the beadboard under a chair rail in there and painted it white and loved how sophisticated it looked. Same thing with the dining room - I would not have wanted that windham cream from floor to ceiling. Not that it looks bad with solid colors, but I think adding mouldings just makes the space look richer...at least in my house it does...lol. I guess I need to keep thinking about this.

Here are some examples of the kind of effect I was going for. Without the shelf these rooms would still be beautiful, but I just think the shelf adds to the look....

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karinL - we are just so not wanting to do wallpaper in this new house. We did it in the last house but this house we wanted to stick to paint. I know there are beautiful patterns out there though.

All of the homes built in my area since around 1995 have 9 foot ceilings as a standard on the ground floor at least. 9 feet just isn't that tall. (Our last house was built in 1850 and had 15 foot ceilings!)

I undertand that you may have found your bathroom to be "too tall" all one color but, that was a bathroom. It's a small room and by it's very nature, the ceilings would look tall.

I'll second the suggestion for crown molding. We have almost a foot of crown molding in our living room, dining room, foyer and halls. It's really just a large regular crown molding at the top and then another piece of molding set 4-5" below that. The entire thing is painted white, including the bit of wall in between the two pieces of molding so that it just looks like a very deep crown molding.

Hi Nutmegxo.

I see why you're attracted to those last pictures. The fresh colors & nice workmanship make those rooms seem very attractive. However, you say that your house is a center hall Colonial, and those wall treatments derive from Mission and Arts & Crafts style house of the early 1900s, where the whole idea was to create a completely different--a more modern--feel than the Colonial houses of the century before. Oh, sure, you can mix styles all up--people do it all the time--but while a mix of different furniture styles in a single house can work out just fine, a mix of architectural feaures cobbled together from different styles in different centuries isn't often a success, especially when, as in a center hall plan, each room is clearly visible from the other.

Normal size doorways with doors that close allow you to sneak the odd painted room into a house full of stained wood, or add an Art Deco bathroom to a Tudor manse, but the typical broad doorways in Colonial Revival houses make using different architectural styles in adjacent rooms a dicier proposition. That's the thinking behind some of the posters' suggestion above.

Let's take a closer look at that blue room you posted. Pretty colors, that's for sure. But there are a few things that show somebody missed the bus. One of the things that bothers me is that the door looks like a generic six-panel door out of the Big Box store. These days, six-panel doors are as ubiquitous as were hollow-core slab doors when I was growing up in the 196Os, and like those doors, these are often used where they don't belong. A six-panel door in a modern house or contemporary condo is every bit as out-of-place as a slab door in a Federal style house, and just because they're easy to find (and some people see them as 'nicer' than cheap hollow core doors) doesn't make them suitable.

Even if we assume that whever combined a door style from 1760 with a wall treatment from 1900 knew exactly what they were doing--and I'm not at all sure that's the case--they still missed an opportunity to do it well. Look at the door's cross-member. Now look at the upper horizontal on the wall. How hard would it have been to raise that wall molding four inches so it would align with the lines of the door? Or, if instead of painting the door all white, they really wanted to feature the [mismatched] door, why didn't they space the wall's moldings to match the panels on the door? Doing that could have allowed the blue to flow unbroken across the door's lower panels, better integrating the door into the overall look of the room. But instead of going to the hassle of finding a more approriate period-style door--either a five-panel model with stacked horizontals, or a three-panel model with one square panel above two vertical panels--or, if this wall treatment is new, adjusting it to match the door's proportions, they just took the easy no-thought middle course, buying & hanging a generic door with little thought given to how to better relate it to the other features in the room. Those kind of details are the things that, thought about early enough in the process, can make a a huge difference in the final results, and they often cost no more than doing things the same way everybody else does them and coming up with the same predictable results. Good design isn't about money, it's about thinking. But these days, all it takes is a pretty coat of paint to make a lot of people think a room is well-designed. M.

whitdobe - thanks so much for your input!! We are definitely planning on doing the crown moulding in the LR just as we did in the DR. Your crown sounds GORGEOUS!! And I think you just inspired me to have DH add to it and paint the entire thing white as you described. I realize that some homes have higher ceilings and you make a great point about the bathroom seeming taller because it is a more compact space. I think for us the ceilings feels so high because our last home was cramped and had 8' ceilings. This house has the 9' ceilings and the LR and DR flank a 2 story foyer which just makes us feel like the walls go on forever up into the sky...which is a good thing LOL.

magnaverde - WOW! I appreciate your analyzation there!!! I am a sponge when it comes to learning these decorating perspectives so I enjoyed reading your post. My house was built in 2001 so it is brandy new but the style of the home is a center hall colonial. Other than basic builder's grade baseboards and door casings, there is no other millwork in the house. Windows do not have casing, and there was no crown moulding. I guess I should take a picture of our doors to give a feel for our house, but all doors in the house have two large panels on them, the top panel being arched at the top and the bottom one being square. The house is pretty much a blank slate for us to define our style into it and the photo above of the recently completed dining room shows our style that we want to carry throughout the home.

I was not intending on copying those sample pictures, but in general I liked how mouldings were used to add character to the rooms and help to break up the colors. As I mentioned, I was trying to balance out with my DR because we put in the chair rail and wainscoting in there. Is it alright to have my DR with the wall half white and half yellow and then make my DR all green from floor to ceiling? Won't I need more white in the DR to balance it?

You can also easily tear out the builder's grade baseboards and put in wider baseboards to complement the crown moulding.

There is no need to have the dining room and living room match as much as you seem to think necessary, even if you can see them both from the center hall. I have had homes where the living room and dining room were right next to each other joined by a wide entry. We had a chair rail in the dining room with different colors above and below. The LR had a color similar to, but not exactly the same as the top color in the DR. I also agree that a plate shelf would be out of place in the LR, especially if you are trying to adhere to a colonial style.

Thank you everyone, this really helped me getting this feedback...this forum ROCKS MY WORLD! lol I am going to paint the whole room Paris Rain and then just have DH put in a really nice thick crown moulding which I will do in Linen White. THANKS SO MUCH..will be painting this weekend!

In addition to crown molding, you can install a second piece of smaller molding about 6" or so down the wall. Paint the new molding, the crown, and the strip of wall in between in your trim color. This seriously beefs up the look of the crown, and visually lowers your ceiling. This is what we did in our living room at our last house (a center hall colonial with 9' ceilings)

Connie

Thanks Connie - I am going to talky to hubby and see if he can do that. He does use the "cheater blocks" for the crown...lol...so I hope what you described will still work with that. When I say cheater blocks I am meaning that he uses the corner pieces to prevent having to miter the corners. Here is a picture from our home to show an example...he also uses the blocks in the center of the wall...

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