For most of the last several decades, the ceiling has been the one surface in a room treated purely as infrastructure: painted flat white, textured to hide imperfections, and otherwise ignored by anyone making design decisions. That's changing, as designers increasingly treat the ceiling — sometimes called the fifth wall — as a legitimate surface for color, pattern, and detail.

The simplest version of the trend is color: a saturated paint color carried up and over the ceiling rather than stopping at the crown molding, which tends to make a small room feel enveloping rather than boxed in, an effect that runs counter to the old assumption that dark ceilings shrink a space.

The ceiling is the one surface every person in the room shares a view of. It's strange it took this long to notice.

Wallpaper on ceilings, once a strictly Victorian affectation, is back as well, usually in smaller rooms — powder rooms, entries, breakfast nooks — where the pattern reads as a considered surprise rather than an overwhelming amount of one material.

At the higher end, applied ceiling detail is returning too: coffered grids, applied wood beams, and plaster medallions, executed with the same renewed interest in craft that's driving the plaster-wall and hand-poured terrazzo trends elsewhere in the industry.

Lighting designers note one practical benefit buried in the trend: a ceiling with texture, color, or a soft matte finish diffuses light much more forgivingly than a flat white ceiling with a satin sheen, which tends to bounce back glare from any downlight aimed at it.