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Between their sloped ceilings, awkward angles, and limited natural light, attics are frequently relegated to storage duty. But for designer Andrew Suvalsky, those challenges were exactly what made this third-floor conversion so satisfying. His client needed a hardworking home office for frequent Zoom meetings. The catch? The room sat tucked right beneath the roofline, with low half walls, dormers, and barely any natural light. “The wall becomes the ceiling becomes the angle,” says Suvalsky. “If you treat all of that with one paint color it falls flat, but too much contrast and it reads chopped up.” Rather than fighting the room’s architecture, Suvalsky leaned into it. His solution was a surprisingly simple one: cover the ceiling and angled walls in a high-gloss pink lacquer finish.
Bounce the Light Around
Phillip Jeffries’s lacquered wallcovering in the color Paint It Pink (although not a paint at all) wraps the room, creating a rosy glow that feels playful rather than precious. The high-shine finish bounces the meager light around the room, making the pitched roofline feel taller and footprint feel larger than it actually is. “In a room with no real daylight, the reflection is doing a lot of the work,” he explains.
Give the Gloss a Counterpoint
To keep the room from reading as one big wash of pink, Suvalsky grounded the lower walls in a moody House of Hackney wallpaper. “A high-gloss finish can’t be the only thing carrying the room,” he notes. “Something else has to stand up to it.” The pairing creates a push and pull between shine and depth, so one never overwhelms the other.
Let the Roofline Dictate the Layout
Suvalsky tucked built-in shelving under the eaves, while a desk floats in the tallest part of the room so that the sloped sealing won’t encroach on whoever is sitting in the office chair. On the other side of the space, a small sofa is the perfect fit, serving as a reading spot for the homeowners’ children as well as a guest bed. “A room like this isn’t asking for one thing,” Suvalsky says. “It’s asking for three or four at once.”
Don’t Get Hung Up on Wallpaper Versus Paint ne
“It comes down to the color you’re after,” explains Suvalsky. Wallpaper can sometimes be the easier route, since achieving a flawless high-gloss paint finish often requires extensive prep work. But the bigger consideration is making sure the hue feels connected to the rest of the room. Elsewhere in the same house, he coated the ceiling of a dim grand foyer in a reflective Tiffany blue. Let there be light.