Oops. I'm only just seeing this. The paint color is Benjamin Moore's Smoke. I use Aura paint, which is full spectrum. I think colors look great with full spectrum paint. :) The dining room is more of a nook in an open condo. The left side is where the front door and coat closet are. The right side is where you enter the kitchen (there is a bar there, too). Most of my neighbors have a tiny table and two chairs in the space, but one uses it for a desk...it's really a pass through. The chairs were custom made. They were an insane splurge about three years ago, before those chairs were everywhere. My options were a Ballard Designs chair that I didn't feel comfortable buying sight unseen, and similar chairs by Bernhardt, Z Gallerie, and Baker. I had a picture of the fabric I wanted in my head (cream, geometric stitching with a slight sheen), so I wound up having the chairs made. It wasn't any more expensive than the Bernhardt chairs would have been. You can see more of my place on my blog. Just click my username. There's a show stopper in the living room. I'll let you find it. :)

I like the look of "wrap around" color and, personally, wouldn't miss the lack of white or off white ceilings. The only downside of your approach, however, is that when you repaint a room eventually, you MIGHT need to repaint the ceiling again (and 10 foot high tray ceilings are not the easiest to paint). I say MIGHT need to repaint because I am typing this from my study where the ceiling is yellow (from a previous decorating scheme) and the walls are now peacock blue. We repainted the offwhite trim and changed the walls to a strong blue, but our yellow ceiling was in fine shape and we let it stay yellow.

oh yes, they can't play with the paint unless they have certain amount of it..you need to make a separate sample. lots of money in our case, yes. (our GC included 3 samples per room; but we needed more..)) we have a main space (entry, living, dining, kitchen, corridor)-that's one color plus one corresponding ceiling color then a family room: another color plus ceiling color then two kids/guest baths-two different colors plus two ceiling colors, accordingly then four bedrooms-4 colors plus 4 ceiling colors then a master bath -yet another wall color plus a ceiling color it sounds like a mishmash but it's not. I put all the samples together(they were on paper), and moved them around the house..and stared at them for a day or two. to see whether they flow and work with each other they did because of the light changing throughout the day, some of them read as very close colors sometimes. Interestingly, I do remember every name of every paint. Working on them so hard. But I have it on a list too the problem with tweaking the formula-harder to match within X years if you don't remember the color, yet still like the paint. You can ask though to open an account in the store so they put your custom colors in their system. Affinity is great quality..used it in some rooms in our previous place. The one we've got now-should be cool too but they bought a lower-grade paint. I don't think it's on our GC (he's an extremely transparent guy, and he'd give us a choice) rather think it's on the painting sub. We figured it out by pure chance and it was too late by then. Let me tell you-the difference in how it holds is striking. I'm livid sometimes thinking about it. Actually my husband wanted to repaint with higher quality paints everything before moving in..but it would mean another couple of thousands probably more..and we had to move fast, and I was tired as hell.

I like the existing color too. Sometimes we just want change for the sake of change, but its not always an upgrade.