I like it too - but, if you are hell bent on painting it - why not get some poster board, put a color on it and tape it up. Leave it up for a week or so and see if you really, really want to paint it. Your surround is very pretty - I like that it's a creamy color w/a glaze. That is a different look. If you do want it to be more elegant/blingy - why not think about putting up a different screen. Maybe a silver color or one that matches your pretty cocktail table. Something w/a mirrored look?

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.

Hello! Congrats on the new house! I would call that cherry or a redder walnut. I wouldn't do White Dove. I loooooove using White Dove, but only for trim in the house like all of the mouldings or doors, chair rails, things like that. My absolute favorite whites are: -BM Glacier White- -BM Moonlight White: I also really love BM Navajo White, but it may be too creamy for that room. It's worth getting a large sample though! Good luck:)

None of these mantels shown in previous examples will work as depicted because your mantel will be much higher due to the way the fireplace is designed. So I do not see being able to use a mantel as an option. Cover it all with stone floor to ceiling like the example below: This mockup shows your existing stone floor to ceiling, which you probably won't be able to match. So you may need to remove all the stone and start over. But you can cover the black metal box more like you see here. Any mantle would likely need to be about 12" above that top vent to meet code, which is just too high for a mantel. The current mantel is not designed properly and appears to be a stock size shelf someone just hung. It is also likely not up to code. If you could use a mantel, it should wrap around the fireplace. But again, it will be too high.