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"VIEW MORE PHOTOS   In decorating we go to great lengths to adorn our walls; why is the ceiling any different? White stucco has been the standard for far too long, and it&amp;#039;s time to seize the missed decorating opportunity! Add color and pattern to your ceiling and it will undeniably enliven the room. Hand-painted or textured ceilings are fabulous, if it&amp;#039;s in the budget, but the right selection of wallpaper can achieve the same effect. In fact, the earliest known fragment of European wallpaper that still exists today is in Cambridge and isn&amp;#039;t on the walls, it is on the ceiling! Wallpaper can celebrate great architecture or give life to the boring box. We don&amp;#039;t recommend it for every room (or even all of a room), but it in the right space it will elevate your decorating in every sense of the word. Susan Yelavich&amp;#039;s new book Contemporary World Interiors (Phaidon Press, 2007) showcases the best of great design around the world. It is full of remarkable decorating ideas, but it is the ceiling treatments that really struck us. Here are a few examples of how the pros celebrate the ceiling and how you can, too. Consider Wallpaper . . .        In Stairwells  It takes some decorating chutzpah to wallpaper your living room ceiling; that is why stairwells are a good place to start. If the architect of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis did the gallery&amp;#039;s vast ceiling in this acanthus leaf pattern, it might have taken away from the art, but instead a hint of pattern adds a grace note to the sea of white. The change helps guide the guests to the next room. It demarcates the new area, and the continuous design helps lead guests down the passageway. In our own homes, the perfect space to do this is on the stairwell ceiling of an attic or basement. You get the fun of using bold color and pattern, but you only need to see it in passing\u2014and you&amp;#039;ll love it when you do.       As Cover-up All painted ceilings crack eventually, but instead of patching the problem, Joseph Holtzman accentuated it. At Camp Nest, he painted more cracks to create pattern and intrigue. Adding more white paint has such minimal return; if your ceiling needs a fix, consider pattern instead. However, if you are papering a whole ceiling in an average-sized room like this, it is safer to keep the colors light and the pattern subtle. This will create intimacy without seeming congested.      For Odd Walls Dormered ceilings could be considered a spatial drawback, but we think if you&amp;#039;ve got it, flaunt it. Fill a small, awkward wall space with pattern and it will appear a virtue, not a limitation. The ceiling of this Stockholm apartment is at an extreme slant, but by adding a delicate green-on-green floral, the architecture is celebrated. To harmonize the space, the small print is supported by a similar green vegetal paper on the lower wall. When you use wallpaper in unconventional ways, it should connect to the space in conventional ways: color and theme.      Get started with latest wallpaper choices in our slideshow. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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