Through most of this century, the ceiling has been kissed off with a coat of paint and a center light fixture.
No more.Now interior designers are looking up to the ceiling as a source of enhancement. They are covering it with decorative paint, surface ornamentation and fabric and hanging eye-catching fixtures in bedrooms, living rooms, baths and kitchens.
At three spring decorator showhouses in the New York area, for example, ceilings were often focal points, and their treatments went well beyond adding a few exposed beams.
Creating an all-over pattern with moldings or painted designs was one popular idea. Barbara Ostrom did both in the living room at the Hudson River Showhouse in Nyack, N.Y. The effect imitates the plaster ceilings often found in old English manor houses.
Ostrom commissioned an artist to paint an overall design of circular fretwork on the ceiling. She also attached at regular intervals 136 plaster casts made of an ornamental molding used elsewhere in the room. She then repeated the ceiling motifs on woodwork and furnishings.
"An elaborate ceiling pulls a room together in a way that a big blank white space cannot do," says Ostrom, a decorator in Mahwah, N.J., and New York. "It adds richness and sparkle to a space that might have been just another dowdy old-world room."
Also at the Nyack showhouse, David Barrett of New York hired a muralist to paint a pink and red striped canopy on the ceiling of a bedroom and sitting room. The purpose was to enhance the fantasy of the room meant to resemble a romantic ruin, says Tony Lyons, senior designer with Barrett's firm.
"The scene on the ceiling created a great sense of depth and added to the romantic illusion of a castle or ruined battlement from the 18th century," Lyons says.
The illusion was heightened with trompe l'oeil paintings that created the illusion of ropes held in place with nails against stone work and of rips in the tenting opening to blue sky.
The images were, of course, a fantasy. But the center light fixture was real. It was an 18th-century gilded bronze chandelier with rock crystal pendants and candles. And it helped make the ceiling just that much more believable, Lyons says.
While Barrett and Ostrom looked to previous centuries for inspiration, Jean P. Simmers went no further than last year's Operation Desert Storm. She used fake leaves caught in camouflage netting. The netting, which armies throw over tanks and artillery in the theater of war, covered the ceiling and upper walls of a multiwindowed sleeping porch at a showhouse in Rye, N.Y.
"I loved the texture and the concept of camouflage material when I saw it in a booth at an antiques show," says Simmers, a decorator in Rye. "But let's face it, I'm not going to get a client to say, `Sure, do my room in camouflage.' So I did it for my imaginary client - Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf."
The rough material worked well because the room has stone walls and brick window sills, Simmers says. She continued the military and the outdoors themes with limestone tile floors, stars and stripes on accessories, and books on military strategy. She also used trompe l'oeil, painting a ceiling that looked like the top of a tent. She then put curtains sewn to look like tent flaps in the adjoining sitting room.
The color scheme? Khaki and camouflage green, of course.