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.

Looks awesome! I do though, have to admit I don't understand the black hole. It doesn't appear like it would, however I'm not there and it's not my choice either ^_^ My walls will be Lancaster Whitewash by Benjamin Moore, and I'm doing Black Ink on the mantel and surround, because I love the soft black with the blue undertones. It's a nice contrast against the black of the gas insert. Ours is an open concept, foyer, living room and kitchen all one big room. Foyer being more elongated, then you walk into the rest. My absolute dream, is to find an old surround, maybe with a double mantel and mirror in it, and remove this new surround with mantel. I dig antiques...lol

Thanks to everyone for their input. So, we painted it the same as the trim. Here's what it looks like now! We'll paint the gold trim black another day. This refurb took a lot out of us!

There are more colors in the rainbow than white, black and gray. Why not paint the fireplace a deep dark version of your favorite color: navy blue or deep forest green or a dark red?