How to make a room look bigger with paint?
Choose a high-LRV colour and carry it across the walls, trim and ceiling. Light colours return more light into the room, and removing the contrast between wall and trim removes the visual lines that tell your eye where the room stops.
Why LRV does the work
LRV matters more than the hue. A colour at LRV 80 opens a room whether it is white, pale grey or soft blue; a colour at LRV 30 closes it in regardless of how cool it is. The old advice to "use cool colours" is a weaker version of the same idea, because cool pale colours happen to have high LRV.
Painting the trim the same colour as the wall — same colour, different sheen — is the single most effective move, because a contrasting trim line frames and shrinks each surface.
How we sourced this
This answer is composed from our knowledge base, which holds only what a regulator, a standards body or a manufacturer supports. The sources behind it are listed below with the date we accessed each one. If a claim on this page has no source under it, that is a bug — tell us and we will fix it.
Where a figure is product-specific — coverage, dry time, recoat time, temperature limits — we point you at the manufacturer's technical data sheet rather than printing a general number as though it were a specification. That distinction is the most common error in this trade, and it is the one that costs people a repaint.
Common mistakes
- Reaching for cool colours rather than light ones. LRV does the work; temperature is secondary.
- Painting trim a contrasting white, which frames and visually shrinks every surface.
- Leaving the ceiling a different white from the walls, which draws a line where the room stops.
- Using a high-sheen finish to "bounce light". Sheen reveals surface flaws far more than it adds brightness.
Sources
- W3C. WCAG 2.2 — relative luminance (accessed 2026-08-17).
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