The first room that anyone will see when visiting you is the hall, so make it as inviting and welcoming as possible. Choose warm color for the décor and make sure the lighting is sufficiently bright and yet warm to enable your visitors to see everything well. There is nothing worse than arriving at a home on a dark and stormy night, to walk into a murky, gloomy entrance hall. Equally, if you have a porch or standing area outside the front door, make sure that this is well lit, too. Lights with infra red sensor are especially useful here as you can leave them turned on when you go out so that on your return they immediately light your way home.
Sadly, all too often the hallway is merely a narrow passageway with the staircase leading from it and it can be very difficult to make sense of the space. If you have a hall like this, one option you may want to consider before doing anything else, is knocking it through to another room to create a living room hall, or even a dining room hall. Rooms are becoming increasingly multi functional and if you look at your space laterally like this, you can often bring to mind some excellent solutions for making the most of what you have.
If possible, though, it is worth trying to retain a small lobby, especially if there is nowhere else for coats, boots and buggies to go. If there is no space, at least make sure there is a sufficiently large cupboard to hand where coats can be hung, boots neatly installed and buggies flung. With hooks, racks and containers, a small space can be used to its maximum potential.
Halls, or even hall dining rooms, tend to be places where you pass through all too quickly, and so are good candidates for strong color or exciting decorations. Research by a paint company has shown that many people choose to decorate their hallway in shades of green a subconscious desire to bring the outdoors in, perhaps, if this is your natural remember that greens can be either warm shades, if there is a higher proportion of yellow in the mix, or cooler, if the blue element of green predominates.
When you are choosing your shade, experiment with tester pots first. The expanse of wall in a hall is usually so large by far the greatest surface area in this space and awkward to decorate, that it would be disastrous to find you have the wrong color when you have finished. Look at the color in natural and electric lighting, too. Depending on the sort of bulb that you use to light the hallway, the color will be greatly affected. A yellow tungsten bulb or the white of halogen lighting, for example, will dramatically change the overall affect in the evening.
Of course, if your hallway doubles as another room, you may find green a little too difficult to live with for long periods of time. Dining with such a color in the background is not particularly comfortable so bear this in mind when looking at color schemes; warm shades of terracotta are especially lovely in the evenings. Put your lights onto dimmer switches, too
