Color is one of the best tools for affecting how people perceive a room. If a room is small and you want it to look bigger, coordinating wall and floor colors and choosing designs carefully will fool the eye into perceiving a larger space. Here are several techniques that will help. Does this Spark an idea?
Make walls and floor the same color. This blurs the boundaries so that the eye isn't clear where the wall ends and the floor begins, which makes the room seem larger. Having a sharp contrast between wall and floor color emphasizes the tiny dimensions of the floor, making it clear how small the room is. This one-color technique works as well with a dark color as a light one. The trick is to blanket the entire space in one color so that the eye has a harder time registering the actual size of the room.
Emphasize diagonal lines. The diagonal is the longest dimension across a floor. Emphasizing the longest line makes the room feel larger. You can place tiles or floorboards on the diagonal, choose a rug with a diagonal pattern, or paint a diagonal motif, such as diamonds, on the floor.
Paint the baseboard the same color as the floor and the walls a slightly different color. The eye will read the baseboard as part of the floor and assume the floor is larger than it actually is.
Use cool colors. Cool colors seem to recede from the eye, so walls and floor painted in cool blue, green, purple or gray will actually seem farther away than the same spaces painted in warm red, orange, yellow or beige.
