Choosing paint for a north facing room

A north facing room gets no direct sun at any point in the day. What it gets instead is light bounced off the sky, which is consistent from morning to evening, slightly blue, and considerably less intense than the light in a room facing any other direction. That is the whole technical situation, and almost every paint decision in the room follows from it.

The instinct, when a room feels cold, is to choose a warm colour to compensate. A soft yellow, a warm cream, a peachy neutral. In a north facing room these very often go muddy. The cool light strips the warmth out of the pigment and what is left reads as dirty rather than warm, and yellows in particular tend to slide towards a sickly green.

Brilliant white is the worst choice, not the safe one

People reach for brilliant white when they are unsure, on the reasonable theory that white is neutral and bright. Modern brilliant white is neither. It contains optical brighteners and a blue base, which is what makes it look crisp on a colour card under shop lighting. Put it on the wall of a north facing room and the blue base meets the blue light and the wall reads grey, flat and slightly cold. It is the single most common mistake we are asked to fix.

If you want a white in a north room, look for one with a warm base, meaning a touch of red, yellow or a warm grey in the mix. It will look creamy and slightly wrong on the card next to brilliant white. On the wall it will look like white.

Understand light reflectance value

Every paint has a light reflectance value, or LRV, on a scale from 0 for absolute black to 100 for pure white. Most manufacturers publish it. It is the most useful single number on a paint specification and almost nobody looks at it.

In a north facing room, a colour in the 60s and 70s will frequently read brighter and more alive than one in the high 80s, because a colour with real pigment in it has something for the weak light to work with. Very high LRV paints in a low light room have a way of going dead, like a photograph that has been overexposed.

The other reason LRV matters is that light in a small room bounces repeatedly. In a room with white walls and a white ceiling and a pale floor, light hits several surfaces before it reaches your eye, and it loses a little at each bounce. A room finished entirely in high LRV paint can genuinely be dimmer than a room with a deeper colour and one bright surface.

Two approaches that both work

The first is to lean into it. Choose a colour with genuine depth, in the greens, blue greens, deep clay tones or proper dark neutrals, and let the room be a quiet, enclosed, low light room. This works particularly well in a room you use in the evening, because a room with depth of colour looks superb under lamplight and a pale north facing room looks like a waiting area.

The second is to choose a warm neutral with a red base rather than a yellow one. Reds hold up under cool light in a way yellows do not. The colour will read as warm without going muddy, and it will not fight the light coming through the window.

What rarely works is the middle ground, meaning a pale slightly warm off white with no real character. That is the colour that goes beige on the wall and disappoints everybody.

Test properly, which takes longer than you think

Paint two coats onto A2 sized pieces of primed lining paper or board, not directly onto the wall. Painting a patch onto an existing wall gives you a false reading, because the old colour around it changes what you see and because a small patch always reads differently from a whole wall.

Move each board around the room. Put it on the wall opposite the window, then on the window wall itself, then in the darkest corner. Those three positions can look like three different colours. Look at them first thing in the morning, at four in the afternoon, and at night under the lamps you actually own rather than the ones you intend to buy.

Leave the boards up for a week. Nearly everyone changes their mind between day two and day five, and it is much cheaper to change it then.

The things people forget

The ceiling counts. A stark white ceiling over a coloured wall creates a hard line and pulls the eye up to the brightest surface in the room. In most north facing rooms we either paint the ceiling in the same colour, or in the same colour cut back with a proportion of white, which keeps the room quiet and makes it feel taller rather than shorter.

Sheen counts too. A dead matt finish absorbs light, which is lovely in a room that has plenty and costly in a room that does not. In a north room, consider an eggshell on woodwork and joinery rather than a full matt, because those surfaces will bounce a little of what light there is back into the space.

The floor counts most of anything people do not consider. It is the largest uninterrupted surface in most rooms and it sits directly under the window. A pale floor in a north facing room does more work than any wall colour.

And if the room genuinely has too little light rather than the wrong colour, no paint will fix it. In the kitchen in a Victorian terrace we put a rooflight over the sink for £1,400 and it changed the room more than every other decision put together. In the living room in a listed farmhouse, where new openings were not an option, we went the other way and gave the room depth of colour and good lamps instead.

Which is the real point. Paint is a response to the light a room has. Decide what the light is doing first, then choose. And decide it alongside the lighting, because a colour that works at eleven in the morning and fails at seven in the evening has only been chosen for half of the day.