Painting all ceilings white makes no more sense than painting all walls white. A ceiling is a surface. You paint it to contribute to the sense of proportions, light, and mood that you want in the room.

I just painted our office room "Plaintain" by C2, and following the collective wisdom of some earlier AT comment thread, I painted the ceiling "ceiling white" plus a few dribbles of Plaintain. I just added the color a teeny bit at a time until you could see a slight difference between the paint in the bucket and the all-white paint on the lid. As I was painting the ceiling (while the walls were still white) it looked like a very light yellow; now that the walls are painted it just looks like white, but white that comes from the same color family as the walls. I think it worked out quite well.

Dark colors recede, correct? So painting your ceiling darker will make it look higher. Also, painting it the same or very similar color to the walls will make it harder to see where the walls end and the ceiling begins thus, again, it looks higher. The exception is where there's an interesting line between the walls and ceiling - such as with a vaulted ceiling, a-frame, curved wall, etc. In that case you want to use a ceiling color that is dramatically different from the walls (i.e. possibly white) to emphasize the unique architecture.

wende has it. It doesn't make sense to paint the ceiling uniformly white in every situation.

i say it depends. if you have very tall ceilings, a color can look elegant or funky.

It depends. White, except in our bedroom, which is silver. I want an even more silver effect, and am thinking of leafing it...

White ceilings affect the room in a large way-it's 1/6 of the room's largest paintable surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling) and to just go default white can alter the style and feeling you want for the room.

I like to use the ceiling color as an accent to the room, a way to further tie the colors of the furnishings, walls, flooring together, or to connect it with adjacent rooms. A sage green living room with a purple guest bathroom can have a lavender ceiling. The contrast of strong wall colors can also be too much with a white ceiling-reddish terracotta walls in a bedroom seem very dramatic with a white ceiling, but seem softer and warmer with a dusty peach ceiling. Going just a few shades lighter on a ceiling than the wall color can make a strong color much more appealing. I agree with wende.

Can you imagine this discussion if you look at the opposite room surface-should we all have white floors for continuity?

I just went through this when I painted my bedroom BM "Davenport Tan" which ended up to be a bit darker than I thought. It seemed like it would be too much to have a similar color on the ceiling, so I went with white.

However, in my bathroom which is smaller, has lower ceilings and will be a lighter color, I am painting the ceiling the same color as the walls.

Although I like the idea of adding the wall color to white ceiling paint until you like the amount of contrast.

Suzanne:
Dark colours do not recede. Painting a ceiling with a dark colour (while the walls are pale) will drop the ceiling. Could be cave-like: could help the proportions of the room. Depends how high they are and the effect you want. (A dark ceiling in a hallway, for example, will make lighter coloured ceilings in adjacent rooms seem higher...even when the same height).

Pale colours recede.

My favourite "trick" is essentially what Jenny in DC did. A gallon of compatible white with a cup (or so) of the wall colour mixed in.

I'm a designer who believes that the ceiling is a "fifth wall". I paint them red sometimes. Sometimes white. It all depends on the situation. In my own house some ceiling are white, some aren't. The point is knowing good color theory so that, at the end of the day so to speak, everything goes together.

For a look at one of my red ceilings and thoughts on ceilings in general, visit this link.

http://designhole.blogspot.com/2007/09/ceilings-are-important-too.html

It's only paint. Go for it!

ooohhhhh finally an AT post that is not written in plural form. Thank you Mr. Maxwell.

I think that what recedes is which ever color it is, in the context of the room, that evokes some kind of vapor or air.

Sometimes a white ceiling seems vaguely vaporous, compared to other things, especially in a pre-war apartment with a picture rail molding about 6 inches or so from the top of the wall, when you "white cap" it, by painting everything abovet the molding white, and the molding an accent color and the wall below it another color, because the really grounds the rest of the wall, and makes the "white cap" seem to float.

Anytime you use a warm color on the wall, it feels like the wall is very earthy, which sends a white ceiling up into the vapor.

Some black ceilings in loft-like spaces, which tend to have a night-time feeling (bars, etc.) can make the black look like night-time and feel infinite and give the impression that all that open ductwork is much farther up than it is, to the extent that you even perceive it at all.

When you paint a ceiling a paler shade of the wall color, I think it makes it look like a white ceiling which is so far up that the perfume of the whatever "mist" is on the walls has floated up through the middle of the room.

I once painted walls and arches, etc., a Martha Stewart K-Mart color (this was about 7 years ago or so) called Butternut Squash, or something like that, and it was very earthy, but they had me paint a pale lavend on some of their walls, and to dilute that lavender into some glaze and sponge it over the warm wall color.

Now that REALLY made it look like there was a mist in the air.

Our basement has tan/taupe walls and a brown ceiling (I assume because it has beams and various wires and pipes up there which they were trying to hide). It makes the ceiling, which is already really low, look like it's collapsing on your head; I really hate it.

i a hot architect boyfriend of mine, many years ago, had painted his whole bedroom a deep dark green -- ceiling included, and called it his "warren" (thankfully it had a huge south facing window too). It was pretty darn cozy.
I also like when people paint the ceilings of a small room - like a dressing room/closet or bathroom -- . And the airy feeling of creating a tray ceiling with pale blue... nice!

I'm thinking of painting my ceiling silver. I have lots of pipes running along it in my entryway and kitchen, and I've got a normal ceiling in the living/bedroom. I thought this would mimic those tin ceiling tiles that I can't quite afford.

I recently painted my bathroom an awesome green, a bold color choice for me! When it came time to do the ceiling, I went one color lighter on the color strip. (My color shoice was the middle tone.) It looks very good and I was quite pleased that it was not white. I think if you stay in the lighter end of the color, it will complement, not compete with the walls. But hey, to each their own, so experiment!

I agree with Wende in Phoenix. A ceiling is just another plane, and as design history has shown, ceilings have been just as colorful as the walls, even more so. Why settle for white? On the personal front, I've always had colored ceilings, though most were quite pale, ie an exceedingly pale pink ceiling that added warmth or one of ice blue (Astrakhan by Pratt & Lambert, as I recall).

I do ceilings a shade lighter that the walls on the same color chip and then the molding is the lightest shade on the same chip. traditional probably but it always works and it makes the room look awesome in any light. Once I did the ceiling a shade darker and it made the ceiling seem lower and I had to re-paint.

There's a restaurant in SF called Indigo where they painted the entire ceiling and the top part of the wall above the white crown molding a deep, matte indigo color. During the day the beautiful color is seen, but at night when the lights are dim the ceiling vanishes as if a night sky.

I'd say, cover it in silver leaf.

Sol,
That's because the post is written by Mark Chamberlain. All his color therapy posts are in the first person (in fact, that's what made me notice his name on the bottom of the posts!).

My beautiful tiny EAst Village apartment in new york had a wonderfully tiled bathroom (super tall ceilings). I painted the ceiling (gasp!) DARK PURPLE - with a shower curtain accent of an old piece of fabric a friend brought form India - a sheer purple cloth with GOLD stitching, the bathroom was beautiful. I know, sounds gaudy, but it worked.