By Paul Miller
Interior Designer
Read Time: 5 Minutes
The words clients use to describe their dream home are unique to them. One client may want plenty of room to spread out, another an economical scale that fits their life exactly. Some like traditional elements and others are strictly modern. Despite these differences, all clients seem to agree on the need for their house to feel warm and comfortable.
It isn’t hard to achieve a sense of closeness in a cottage, but sometimes coziness is illusive in a large, two-story family room. I’ve worked in plenty of rooms like this before and know it is always possible to make a stunning transformation if you view the room through the lens of possibilities. Here are a few of my favorite tactics to make even the loftiest rooms feel more down to earth.
Split It Up
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By far the most dramatic change is to divide the height by building out a floor between the main and second levels. This does require drawings from an architect or engineer, but the actual work is fairly straightforward in many instances. One benefit is added upstairs space that can make for a large playroom, home office, storage - or all of the above. Depending on your lot’s septic allowances, it may even be possible to harvest an additional bedroom out of the change.
Other than gaining upstairs space, there are other practical advantages to this tactic. One is improved HVAC efficiency and lighting design. It can be hard to regulate comfortable temperatures in a two-story room. Often recessed lighting dissipates at such heights, casting only a weak light on furnishings and art below. Another benefit of splitting up the levels is in managing how noises and odors travel throughout the house. Some clients in open floor plan concepts find that noises carry into spaces where quiet is preferred and that cooking smells linger in parts of the home where they are not welcome.
Putting practical advantages aside, rooms with a more traditional ceiling height establish what designers call human scale, which tends to feel a bit more comforting. Even clients who like the idea of their two-story room often describe it as cold and hard to decorate. There are many ways to use moldings, lighting, ceiling designs, texture, color, and pattern to make these rooms intimate, beautiful, and beyond ordinary.
Trim It Down
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A fairly simple but effective tactic is to use moldings to divide the vertical planes of the walls. Once installed, the area below can be a different color or texture than the portion above. For best results, choose a receding tone for the upper portion, possibly darker and less saturated than the color below. The goal is to avoid the upper portion becoming too shouty, so consider also carrying that quieter upper wall color onto the ceiling.
It might occur to you to run a crown molding with a dust cover board around the room at the same height as the ceilings elsewhere on the main level, but this typically makes for almost equal bottom and top portions of wall - in terms of scale, not the most pleasing. Consider instead using the molding to divide the wall height in a one to three ratio. If the ceiling height is eighteen feet, you would set your moldings at twelve feet. This will honor that the room was intended to be loftier than neighboring spaces, while permitting the eye to focus on the lower portion.
Scaling art for a twelve foot ceiling is a much less daunting proposition. Additionally, this redefining of the space makes the choice to use drapery on only the lower set of windows much more intuitive and pleasing. An easy way to try the idea out is to put up some painter’s tape around the space and live with it for a few days to see the impact that it has on the way you perceive the room.
Many two-story rooms converge on adjacent spaces like upper hallways without a convenient place to break the moldings or wall color, so consider the addition of a cased opening when needed to create a starting point. Additionally, whenever new moldings converge with upper window sets, consult your designer to determine the proper methods to allow the trims to meet attractively.
Lower The Lights
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When renowned director Orson Welles ran into budget overruns on Citizen Kane, he had his lighting designers illuminate only what he wanted the film to pick up, leaving the incomplete portions of the famously elaborate sets in such darkness that the viewer’s imagination filled in the gaps.
While film noir lighting may not be for everyone, even in a subtler form the concept has merit. Rather than using lighting at the top of a two-story room, bring it down to a more pleasing height with a dramatic ceiling fixture or a series of wall sconces. Simply lighting the room down where you live can result in a comfortable ambiance. To heighten the drama, consider a deep and saturated wall color that shows beautifully in pools of light and in shadow.
Go All In
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For a design that supports the drama inherent in high ceilings, consider using texture and pattern on both the walls and ceiling. Coffering the ceiling with thick beams and moldings will make the space seem richer, but a striking wallpaper can be the additional element that brings everything together and separates your space from others like it. This wallpaper pattern can also help define the design in terms of traditional or modern, playful or contemplative.
When wallpapering two-story rooms, know that the pattern does not have to be that bold or big, given that a lot of it will show. Consider a two-tone design with a moderate scale. Even textured wallpaper such as a faux grasscloth or linen weave can dispel the chill of those large masses of drywall soaring overhead. Faux grasscloth typically has little to no variation, making the seams less visible, an advantage in this scenario, given that a lot of definition on the vertical panels might enhance rather than diminish the height of the walls.
Big Spaces Demand Big Ideas
I hope my suggestions will give you something to think about. Know that in design anything is possible and the best ideas are the ones tailored specifically for your house. At the end of the day, whether you would rather harvest an upstairs space or simply give your two-story family room a makeover, there are many ways that a thoughtful design can assure your space transcends the expected while offering an intimate setting for family and friends. After all, what is home, if not a place to feel cozy and relaxed.
