Help! Need to choose colour scheme for dark Victorian hall stairs & landing

[mydailymailhell]

Hi all - hoping someone can help me here. Painters are on site, finishing up other rooms and I need to choose a scheme for my HSL. There’s very little natural light. Current inherited scheme is cream walks with white woodwork. Doors are Victorian style pine doors, one has stained glass. Our white bannister gets very dirty so I wanted to paint the newel post and handrail in a dark colour like Railings. Original plan was a sort white throughout with this bit of dark woodwork but now I’m thinking I should be more adventurous and paint the whole stairs dark as well as the skirts. But then I’d need to do architraves as well and the doors would then look odd.

would a light grey like strong white be too draining? White too stark? I’m going out of my mind with all the testers I gave and regretting not getting help from a colour consultant.

I too have a dark Victorian hallway. The whole house if fairly dark. Having lived here for over 20 years I now embrace the gloom and go for dark, moody and dramatic which I love.

I am having the hall painted in F&B French Grey. Walls, doors, skirtings all the same. Ceiling will be something like slipper satin. My floors and banister are original dark wood and the ballistrade and radiators are black cast iron.

I have French Grey in the study which is another dark room with dark wooden floors and furniture and it looks great.

Keep you wooden doors but I would paint the skirtings and door frames the same colour as the walls or go lighter on the walls with a contrasting darker colour on the architraves.

At the moment my hall is Cornforth white walls with Wevet but it looks a bit meh and boring now. I don’t think Strong white would look good without natural light.

Another colour I have used loads is Hardwick white.