Colour scheme for cloakroom.

[gone-gardening]

I have a long narrow cloakroom to decorate and would appreciate some inspiration! The house was built in 1886, is in a small rural village and was built for the estate manager. The room itself measures 1.5m wide x 5m length with 3m ceiling height. The floor is the usual 6” x 6” black and red tiles and the room has a large sunny east facing window. Toilet and hand basin are both traditional in style and white. There is a dado rail which although may not be original, I would like to keep. I would particularly like to use F&B paints. Could anyone recommend a good colour combo to go with these floor tiles?

 

[Moo]

A photo would help - there are lots of clever people here who could Photoshop-in different ideas for you to consider.

 

[Penners]

A general principle for choosing colours is that light colours recede and dark colours advance. So if you want to make to room appear wider and shorter, you might want to choose light colours for the long walls and darker ones for the short walls.

A very high ceiling like yours can be brought down (visually) if you put a picture rail around the walls about three-quarters of the way up, and then paint everything above the picture rail the same colour. This gives the impression that the upper area of the wall is part of the ceiling, and makes the room appear less lofty.

 

[Juju]

I always think that a cloakroom is where you can put whichever colours you want - you can use dark bold colours you might not use elsewhere as it doesn't really matter how dark the room is as no-one spends much time in there! I'm about to decorate our tiny downstairs loo which has no natural light - we're painting the existing panelling on one wall, door and skirting in a mid-blue, and walls in cream. We're then adding some of my partner's extensive collection of old horror movie posters to give guests something to contemplate whilst they're in there! Being the obsessive that I am, I've selected the posters with blue in them so that everything co-ordinates...

Originally I'd intended to use a purply-aubergine colour but it would have clashed horribly with the floor tiles which will have to stay for now.

In a cloakroom with black and red tiles and natural light, I'd be tempted to continue the theme and use a bold red on one wall if not all.

 

[chuckey]

Our downstirs loo/ shower room is small 6' X 4' X 10' high. I tiled the whole with those small cheapo spacer tiles (now unobtainable :evil: ). About 70% of them are white with picture frames( single tile width) in a colour that matched the suite. These reflect the general shape of things on their adjacent wall, like under a 4' long mirror is a rectangle of coloured tiles, then another underneath thaat one. The reason was that when I did this the coloured tile were significantly more expensive and I was skint (still am) and when all is said and done, a plain coloured tiled room is very flat, so called "random" feature tiles are usually naff.
Frank