Accent Wall Painting in Fort Worth, TX

Dark blues, greens, charcoals and reds are made with a deep or clear base that contains less white pigment. That's what gives them richness, but it also means they hide poorly. Rolled straight over a white or beige wall, a navy might need four or five coats to look solid. We prime first with a gray-tinted primer chosen to match the depth of the finish color, which brings most deep colors to full coverage in two coats. Very saturated reds, oranges and yellows can still need a third. Using a premium paint line matters more on accent walls than anywhere else in the house. Better deep-base paints have more pigment per gallon and level out more evenly.

An accent wall is only as good as its edges. At inside corners, we cut the deep color onto the accent wall freehand with a quality angled brush, since tape in a corner tends to bleed into the texture. Where the color stops on a flat plane, such as a color-block line or a stripe, we tape with a sharp-edge painter's tape and then seal the tape edge with the base wall color first. Any bleed is the base color, which is invisible, and the deep color then cuts a clean line. Tape comes off at a low angle while the final coat is still slightly wet, before it can bridge across the edge and tear when pulled.

The wall your eye lands on first when you walk in is usually the right choice: behind a bed headboard, behind a sofa, around a fireplace or at the end of a long hallway. Walls with windows or many doors break up the color and usually aren't as effective. In open floor plans common in 2000s and newer Fort Worth homes, an accent can also define a dining area or a reading nook without building walls. We'll also look at light, because a deep color on a north-facing wall reads much darker than the same color across from a west window.

• Behind a bed headboard or sofa
• Fireplace walls and built-in niches
• The end wall of a long hallway
• A dining zone in an open floor plan

Many accent projects go beyond flat paint. Board and batten or picture-frame molding adds texture and suits farmhouse and traditional homes, and we install the trim strips, fill nail holes, caulk every seam and paint the whole wall in a single color, usually satin. Vertical or horizontal stripes need precise measuring with a laser level, since a stripe that drifts a quarter inch across a wall is easy to spot. Color blocking and arches are popular in kids' rooms and home offices, and we lay those out with you first in pencil so you can see proportions before any paint goes on.

Deep colors in eggshell or satin show scuffs as shiny burnish marks, while matte hides them but can mark with handling. For accent walls behind beds or sofas, a scrubbable matte in a premium line is often the best balance. Touching up a dark color later is harder than on a light one, because a spot touch-up can flash. We leave labeled paint and recommend touching up corner to corner, rather than a dab, when a mark needs covering.