An accent wall is the smallest painting job that can change a whole room, and in Gwinnett County it is usually asked of a house that was built to be neutral: the 1990s two-story in Suwanee with one long family-room wall, the Lawrenceville ranch whose fireplace disappears into beige, the new townhome near downtown Duluth where the builder put the same off-white on every surface. One wall in navy, forest green, charcoal, or a warm clay gives the eye somewhere to land. Done carelessly, it gives the eye a ragged corner and a streak.
Choosing the wall
The right wall is usually the one you see first from the doorway, or the one the furniture already faces: behind the headboard in a primary bedroom, the fireplace wall in a family room, the dining-room wall behind the table, the short wall at the end of an upstairs hall. In the open floor plans that most subdivisions from Hamilton Mill to Grayson were built with, the harder question is where the color ends. It should stop at an inside corner or at a natural break such as a column, a soffit, or a cased opening, never partway along a wall and never wrapped around an outside corner, where it reads as a mistake. Standing in the room together settles that in a minute.
Deep colors need more than two coats
The colors people pick for an accent wall are the hardest ones to lay on evenly. Deep tones are mixed into a clear base with a heavy load of colorant, so each coat hides less than a pale color does, and a navy rolled straight over builder white can take three or four coats before the roller marks stop showing. The better sequence is a primer tinted gray or toward the finish color, then two finish coats rolled wet edge to wet edge from ceiling to baseboard without a pause halfway down. Edges are cut by brush so the line at the ceiling and along the neighboring wall stays straight; tape alone on a textured ceiling lets the color creep under it. A matte or eggshell sheen hides the patches and trowel marks that a dark color exaggerates, and the written quote names the sheen as well as the color.
How Georgia light changes a dark wall
Afternoon sun here is generous, and it moves a dark wall more than a pale one. A deep green on a west-facing wall in Snellville glows warm at five o'clock and turns nearly black on a gray January morning; the same green on the north side of a Peachtree Corners condo stays cool all day. That is why a sample the size of a pizza box, painted on the actual wall and checked in morning and evening light, is worth more than any chip. In the two-story family rooms of Buford and Sugar Hill, where the accent is often the full-height fireplace wall, the color also has to hold up from twenty feet away and opposite the windows, which makes the job a scaffold day rather than a ladder afternoon.
Stripes, color blocks, and two-tone walls
Not every accent wall is one solid color. Horizontal or vertical stripes, a block of color that runs partway up the wall like wainscoting, a painted arch behind a bed or a desk, and simple geometric shapes laid out with a level and low-tack tape are all brush-and-roller work. They take longer than a solid wall, because every edge is cut by hand and each color dries before the next one goes on, so the quote prices them by the layout rather than by the square foot. A painted scene is a different craft, covered on the hand-painted murals page.
Older homes, and what the quote covers
In a home built before 1978, sanding an old wall before the new color goes on counts as disturbing old paint, and beyond a small patch Georgia's lead renovation rules reserve that work for a state-certified renovation firm; painting over a sound wall is a different job, and the walk-through sorts one from the other. Everywhere else an accent wall is a small job and is quoted as one: a free visit, then a written quote that names the color, the primer, the sheen, and the number of coats, and usually a single day of work.