If you’re about to paint a room, would you:
- Paint each wall a different color?
- Paint one wall a different color than the other three with no regard to how it looks?
- Paint each wall to precisely match the colors of everything else in the room?
You probably wouldn’t do any of those options. Instead, you’d pick a paint color that complemented the space, the lighting, adjoining rooms, and the furniture. But what about the floor?
The thing is, a lot of people pay almost no attention to how the wall color interacts with the floor. And what is a floor but a wall that’s lying flat?
Dark hardwood floors and dark walls make most rooms feel like a dungeon unless you have a lot of natural light. Light wood floors need paint colors that accentuate a room, and cherry hardwood floors, laminate floors, carpet, and rugs really change how you think about wall colors and the room.
It’s a good rule of thumb to choose a wall color that is a contrast to your floor color. Here’s how.
How do you match wood floors to walls?
Wood floors come in relatively consistent colors. Unlike carpet which could be a bunch of shades of a similar color, wood floors tend to come in about a dozen consistent colors with two broad elements:
- There are dark wood floors and light wood floors
- There are warm tones and cool tones in wood floors
For instance, a cherry hardwood floor is dark and warm. A black laminate floor is dark and cool.
Telling the difference between warm and cool tones
An excellent way to tell how warm or cool a floor’s color is by examining how red, orange, or yellow a floor is—the more red, orange, or yellow, the warmer the tone. White, gray, and blacks have cool undertones.
How to tell the difference between dark wood floors and light wood floors
A dark wood floor is what you expect it to be: dark! This includes black, gray, and dark stained wood. A dark hardwood floor is most common with laminate flooring and in older or historic homes. But many homes around the East Bay, Walnut Creek, Danville, and Pleasant Hill where we work typically have a wide variety of hardwood floor colors and tones.
Sometimes the names can help, too, like “white oak”. It’s a fair bet something called white oak is a light wood floor.
Cherry and red oak wood floors
Cherry and a red oak hardwood floor are in-between and can vary with age. They’re also among the warmest colors and demand cool wall colors to tone down the color scheme.
For example, painting a wall with yellow undertones alongside a cherry wood floor will be intense.
The best paint colors to complement gray and dark wood floors
Gray is an unusual color as flooring goes. It’s visibly dark but has cool undertones, making them unique and a popular choice among many homeowners.
- With gray floors, stick with warm color paints (reds, oranges, yellows, etc.) and go for contrast.
- Avoid gray walls and gray floors—they’ll feel cold, flat, and one-note.
- Light colors are an okay choice, too, so long as they’re warm.
- If you like it, beige walls can work but require vibrant furnishings to help it along.
Choose warm whites, beiges, creams, and neutral colors to make dark floors work—but not gray. You can also choose dark neutral wall colors, like greens and blues.
