coloured skirting boards?

[allthatglisters]

Thinking of redecorating our lounge natural hessian which we have in the hall and is lovely. Thing is, our white gloss painted skirting boards and door frames etc are in white gloss and I think now looks a bit dated and too much going on in a small space - was wondering about using colour in a tone similar to the walls and in a less glossy paint. Any suggestions? Has anyone tried this?

Skirting boards same colour as walls in most of my house - its an older house which would never have had skirting boards when built. It looks fine. White would just draw attention to them.

GL
presume you have taken central heating out to be authentic too then?

And obv no running water indoors?

When we bought our house all the skirting boards were different colours - shocking pink, dark blue, grey, red, awful awful everywhere

All the woodwork in fact incl window and door frames, all different colours and all vile.

Have now painted it all white

Moved into a Edwardrian house which had those lovely deep skirting boards - they were painted in gloss jade green paint and the picture rails were painted yellow.

Madness. It was the work of months to scrape all the paint off with the assistance of vile paint thinners. They were just clear varnished in the end and it all looked lovely.

So, natural wood if you have decent woodwork in your house, white satinwood if not. Everything else is wrong a la avocado suites and anaglypta.

I think in Edwardian times the woodwork would have very likely been painted dark brown GetOff - I prefer white myself but don't think it is authentic iyswim...

Sorry, Orf, not Off!

Some of our skirting boards are in the same colour as the walls (pale stone/mushroom type colour in the living room, pale lilac in DD's room etc) but are in satinwood not gloss.

Some others are white satinwood. The ones in the dining room and kitchen are natural wood.

In our last house, when we moved in the skirting boards were all painted horrendous bright gloss colours eg. in a white bedroom they were bright red! That takes some painting over, believe me

GleeE4, we started with no central heating and that was just one piece of authenticity too far for me .

Decor - funny you should say that as some of the skirting rooms in the bedroom were painted dark brown. They looked vile - but after the agony of stripping back in the sitting room we just painted over these in white (took coats and coats).

I'm all for authentic when it looks nice - some of the Victorian/Edwardian colours used were vile though.

i htoght dark brown was interwar

but ffs live in a house not a theme park

or theme pub

I wasn't advocating anyone painting their woodwork dark brown today! Personally I prefer painted white to the stripped and varnished look that you often see in older houses...

We did a mixture in our last house. In some rooms we had white (but mainly satin not gloss finish) but in other rooms we used colours. If you want fairly neutral, in one area we used a sort of cream colour which you could get in a matt for walls and satin for woodwork but in exactly the same shade - gave a nice subtle effect.

But in one or two of the other rooms we used an actual colour for the woodwork that went with but didn't match the walls - e.g. one room was a pale straw/cream colour but with one deep red wall, and we used a sort of taupe-coloured paint for the woodwork all the way round that fitted with both the wall colours. It looked nicer than it maybe sounds!

In our old house our bathroom was F&B Ball Green. We had travertine tiling and the skirting boards were Ball Green too, it looked amazing, so colour does work sometimes

we have dulux potters clay in ours - the palest shade is just off white, and we used a slightly darker shade on the walls. Wood work looks white but is less in your face than brilliant white.

We had Crown's Aged White throughout our old house (built c.1840) - it looked great, and I do think that brilliant white would have looked naffola given the age of the house .

All white definitely doesn't work everywhere. We once rented a house with white tiled floors (downstairs) and white walls and it was like living in A&E.

Most of ours are black satinwood. They make the walls look much lighter and brighter in contrast, and are much classier than white which IMO looks a bit bland and bedsitty and makes the rest of the room look dull.

The exception would be if the walls were in a very strong colour like cherry red or ultramarine blue. Bright colours and white work well. Magnolia and white just looks cheap and boring.

If people understood more about the way colours work and the effect they have on each other, less people would use white for their woodwork.

I agree CTJ
Our painter was horrified at colours I chose for bedroom, 3 different shades of peacock blue, ceiling being the palest and walls being the deepest and woodwork somewhere between.
It's the most fabulous bedroom I've ever had

It's about not being afraid of colour.
And in terms of scaring off buyers (if and when you come to sell) that wasn't an issue. The flat sold relatively quickly to someone who loved what I'd done with it!

Yes, do it but definitely not gloss. Any colour on woodwork in gloss will look make it look instistutional.

decorating problem - I have Natural Hessian by dulux painted under the dado rail in small bedroom - please can you suggest what Dulux colour would contrast Natural Hessian to paint above dado rail?