Traditional American house styles tend to have lots of doors and separate rooms. The more modern residential trend is for fewer doors and walls and a more open floor plan. While this change is nicely adapted to contemporary lifestyles and home life, all of those long stretches of uninterrupted floors and ceilings can create challenges for the homeowner or interior designer looking to create a sense of separately defined spaces without having to erect physical barriers.

This objective can be handled at floor level fairly easily, by arranging furniture to enclose spaces and direct traffic. Adding a rug or using different types of flooring surfaces are other options. But these approaches do not work too well on a ceiling, for obvious reasons. Laurie faced this challenge in the family room of a Miami home with a ceiling that flowed straight into the adjacent kitchen and hallway. She wanted to create some type of visual barrier on the ceiling that better helped to define the family room itself, and she decided to do this with the simplest material possible – paint. But rather than paint the entire ceiling above the family room, which would have left an abrupt and clumsy looking paint line at the edges of the room, Laurie chose to paint a large rectangle inset from the walls, leaving a border of the existing paint around the entire room. This created a bold canopy over the room, yet one that maintained a pleasing visual transition in the ceiling plane from one room to the next.

Shopping List

paint
paint tray, roller, and roller cover
2-in.-wide painter's tape
drop cloth

optional items:
molding
finish nails
wood putty
construction adhesive
small paint brush