I just lost my parents, my mom on Christmas Day 2014 and dad just a few weeks ago. Now have their furniture.
For the living room - I have a primarily white cloth sofa with tiny floral print in red and dark blue flowers with green stems and leaves, a white leather loveseat, and my mother's custom Louis XVI throne chairs (made for her design specs in the late 1950s) of pale "baby blue" (a.k.a "powder blue" or "sky blue") crushed velvet and slightly-lighter shade of same blue tinted wood. Their living room (in the house where I grew up) had wall-to-wall high pile carpeting that was was emerald green when I was a child in the 1960s-'70s, and a light mushroom color when I was an adult in the 1980s, '90s, and early 2000s - always with white walls. It also had a pair of pale yellow tinted wood bookcases, which I also have. The tables are brass with glass tops, and a pecan wood table. I think I also still have my parents' pale yellow throw pillows that used to sit on the patterned sofa. (The white leather love seat was newer, I didn't grow up with that.)
I am moving into a new house. It has golden oak hardwood floors. I own an antique late-1920s/early-1930s Art Deco console bar (a Prohibition-era "hideaway" bar) that is gilded emerald green leather and black lacquered wood, which I would like to put in the living room.
This sounds busy, but since the furniture is almost completely all white upholstery, it's really not so crazy with too many colors. But I am at a loss to figure out what color to paint the walls. The room is darker than either the living room I grew up with or the one in this house that I've lived in for 30 years, and it's smaller than either of the other rooms, too.
I have a textured tall white pottery floor lamp, a few wooden floor lamps (darker woods), and pale yellow with blue ginger jar table lamps, as well as my grandparents' antique Stiffel brass table lamps. Also, we have hubby's family's antique piano - a mid-century dark black-brown lacquered Baldwin Acrosonic spinet - and my family's antique piano - a nearly 200-year old upright piano of red mahogany and hand carving all over it. We don't need two pianos and there isn't room for them at the new house. (We're downsizing, as we're now seniors.) It is likeliest that we'll be able to sell the Baldwin spinet piano faster and easier than my upright piano, so we expect to keep the red mahogany upright instrument.
I really hate white walls, having grown up in a house with nothing but white walls and little artwork hanging on those. My parents preferred other forms of art than paintings or prints. I'd like not to have to paint the walls in my own living room white, unless there's no other good option. I do, however, have plenty of oil paintings from hubby's family home, and a good number of prints, and a lot of original water color paintings, oil paintings, and sketches (hubby's sister was an artist).
Help! What color(s) would look best on the walls of my new living room?
Thank you.
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Sorry for your loss.
Could you please upload a photograph or two? This is a lot of information to take in. It would be easier to see some of what you are talking about.
I know you don't want to hear this, but I think you should go with white, especially if you are going to hang a multitude of pictures. I collect paintings and am an artist myself, and I find that white or off white is a very easy colour to live with. Every painting I own looks good on any wall. Modern homes often use a darker grey or tan, and that's a good choice, but I think if the rooms are small, if you have a lot of furniture, and if you want to hang a lot of paintings, a dark colour will not be good and will make the rooms feel closed in.
This is the sofa (with my aunt sitting on it, helping me pack china up).
Sorry about the mess. Mother would be horrified. sigh
This chair is NOT one of mine, but I saw it at a tractor & farm recent auction and was struck because the upholstery on this chair is identical to the color of the blue velvet of the Louis XVI throne chairs I do own, from my parents. The chairs I have aren't available right now (in the back of a packed-full 10ft x 20ft storage unit) and I don't seem to have any pix of them.
I didn't bother to hunt a pic of the white leather loceseat. It's just plain soft squishy white leather.
That was supposed to be "loveseat". lol
Does this help to figure out the color palette?
I just dislike white walls, period. No matter if they are adorned or unadorned with artwork of any kind. I just really dislike white walls much like I prefer white gloss woodwork and hate all-white rooms. I cannot live with an all-white (or even a 95% white) room - especially my living room. sigh
Here is a pic of the Art Deco bar, but this pic was taken before restoration, which I'm in the middle of doing. So it's a greenish-charcoal-ish wood, a darker black wood top, and the gilt green leather (and handles) remain the same - just re-done.
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