What’s Up with Ceilings?

Historic Lafayette Square in St. Louis, Missouri, where I grew up, has some of the oldest buildings in the city. Just south of downtown, the neighborhood was built by the early merchants that made their fortune from shipping and trade on the Mississippi River. The tiny park that sits in the center of the neighborhood is surrounded by one of the oldest wrought iron fences in the country. The area was in steady decline until the 1980’s when the urban pioneers went homesteading, buying up some of the places for just a dollar and committing to invest enough money to restore them to their former glory.

Inside, the buildings needed a lot of work. Some of them had been sectioned into rooming houses and cheap hotels. Most of them originally had three levels and some twenty or thirty rooms. All of the rooms shared some features in common; most had fireplaces that had been bricked over in favor of large cast iron steam radiators that heated the rooms. Most had dark mahogany or oak woodwork that had been covered with countless layers of lead-based paint. Some of the lattice and plaster walls and ceilings were in sad repair and covered with layers of wallpaper, paint, and then more wallpaper. A lot of the ceilings had been covered with intricately pressed tin that also had been painted over several times throughout the years. The rooms were all large and the ceilings were tall, that was the fashion of the day. Then came the hung, or dropped ceiling with the fluorescent lighting, the look of the fifties and sixties.

Now it seems that one of the latest trends in new housing is to make the ceilings tall again, and the old standard of painting all the ceilings white is also being challenged. After all, up is usually the first place that we look when entering a room and still it is one of the most neglected perspectives in interior design. If you paint all of your ceilings white, they tend to just disappear out of the picture. Even if you have twelve-foot ceilings throughout your home, you might think of creating some areas with more warmth like the bedroom, dining room, or bathroom, either by painting that neglected fifth wall a different color, or by decorating it. Basically there aren’t any rules here; anything that you can do to a vertical wall can also be done to a ceiling. Here are a few things that you can try:

Luster stone is a decorative method that is applied with a trowel. The effect is one of a natural reflective stone pattern. The appearance can even look slightly metallic in color. A thick paste is applied in a criss-crossed fashion so that when finished, it has almost a look of suede that has been brushed in the wrong direction. Another technique that you can try is called color meshing. You can take several colors from the room and mesh them together, creating a soft, almost cloudy effect. Tin is back in. If you don’t want the expense and work of installing an actual tin ceiling, there are a couple of ways that you can get the look. Embossed wallpaper can be applied and then covered with a coat of metallic paint, or you can use a variety of peel and stick tiles that are now available. Medallions are decorative faux plaster rings that are relatively easy to install and can be painted in a variety of colors and finishes. You can also get creative by hand painting a border or painting around a ceiling element such as a light. A variety of different patterns on ceiling tiles can also be arranged on your ceiling in different and unique designs that change as you walk around the room.