Alisonn, love your room! And happy to hear that "painting everything white" wasn't the consensus here. Our new home has a lot of wood, with a cathedral wood ceiling in the great room. All I ever got when asking for suggestions on colors or decorating, was "paint it all white".....not necessarily always on this forum. I agree with aktillery and could see a muted olive green leaning toward gray tones shade in your room. Not necessarily what your husband would like. Maybe you could suggest to him to bring COLOR into the room through a bold rug etc.

Beautiful fireplace. I would paint the paneling the same color as the other walls, so the fireplace becomes the star. Here's a similar example for a visual. eta: I'd leave your mantel the color it is. It looks great with the fireplace and floors.

NO to painting the fireplace. Look at it. See how deep the mortar joints are? Those joints will always be dark because they are recessed, so you will end up with a checkerboard grid that looks awful. Plus, it will be very tedious to paint those joints. Plus, plus, the joints are simply dust catchers. If you had normal joints, it would be different--you'd have a subtle variation in texture. This will look like a huge mistake. See the difference in this photo. Finally: That paneling is surely applied over wallboard. It probably pops off with little trouble leaving wallboard with a few small holes in it from the short paneling nails. Easy to patch and will look better than painted paneling (which, IMHO, is a very mobile home look).

That entry is absolutely exquisite! Whatever you do, keep that space the way it is. I do enjoy seeing well preserved specimens of high end mid century interiors. I agree with others about living in the house for a while before you do anything. We bought a mostly unadulterated Victorian, and we had fantasies of getting a bunch of stuff done before moving in (5 months from close to move in), but ended up only refinishing some floors (low impact change). Now I'm super glad we didn't try to do anything - we're getting a sense of how we live in this house (it turns out we use the butler stairs A LOT, and my husband had wanted to tear them out!) and a sense of the small things that wouldn't have even occurred to us before we'd spent time living here, like the fact that we need to add a second ceiling light at the far end of the hall, that we need some more electrical outlets in the dining room, etc.