For Better or Worse, Mirrors Reflect Tastes--and More--of Their Owners

Today’s subject: Mirrors That Aren’t On the Ceiling.

You’re not going to get any cheap titillation out of me. You want cheap thrills, go watch “Geraldo.”

One reason that we’re not going to talk about mirrors on the ceiling is that, according to Garry Sandlin, they’re potentially dangerous.

“I never put them over beds,” says the Huntington Beach interior designer. “They should never be on the ceiling. We live in earthquake country.”

Now that you’ve got a sufficient case of the creeps, let’s move on to the wonderful world of decorating and enhancing your view of life with mirrors that hang safely (and uncomically) on the wall, the way God intended them to.

The purpose of the decorative mirror has been unchanged since large ones first appeared in the 1st Century: to reflect something pleasant to look at. The first mirrors were simply polished metal, but once the technique of applying silvering to the back of a glass pane came along, mirrors began to reflect a good deal more of the world around them as they became larger.

“The concept,” said Sandlin, “is to enlarge a room and to reflect a portion of the room to make it more attractive and larger. That’s basically why designers use them. But some people don’t like them because they don’t want to see themselves in them.”

Yes, that’s the price you pay. Decorate with mirrors and eventually you’re going to have to face yourself down in one. This can be both good and bad.

“I think they can be uncomfortable in dining rooms,” said Veronica Lorman, an interior designer from Corona del Mar. “The dining room is a place where you hope there will be intimate conversation, and a mirror can be distracting for anyone sitting on the side of the table facing it.”

Mirrors, said Lorman, “add a certain amount of glitz and glitter to interiors, but you have to be very aware of what is going to be reflected in the mirror when you’re placing it. You want to reflect something that’s interesting, as opposed to a blank wall on the other side of the room.”

For instance, she said, the room in the house that usually has the most mirrors--the bathroom--has the potential to take on even more glamour with more mirrors. As long as they reflect everything but the toilet.

“It adds a great dimension to the bathroom or the powder room,” said Lorman, “a kind of sparkle,” particularly if the mirrors extend all the way to the ceiling. With mirrors set that high on the wall, more light from ceiling-mounted lighting fixtures is reflected around the room, suffusing a room that might normally be rather dark with even more brilliance.

Elsewhere, she said, hanging mirrors can offer the amateur designer a second chance to get it right.

“You have choices,” she said. “You can get someone to hold it up, and then you can walk around the room to see it from different angles, to see what it’s reflecting when you’re sitting on the sofa, as opposed to what you see when you first walk in the front door.”

Mirrors also can be the best friend of the homeowner whose house has small rooms. A trip to the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles (actually a fairly thin room) will show you that the mirror as an optical trick is unsurpassed at opening up a room. One easy way to do this, said Sandlin, is to simply have the mirror reflect an outdoor view rather than a facing wall. This not only brightens the room by reflecting daylight into it (particularly into the room’s darker areas), Lorman said, it creates the illusion of another window.

It can be easy to commit decorating and safety sins with mirrors, however. It’s probably not a good idea, said Lorman, to place a small mirror over a large piece of furniture, or a large mirror over a small piece. Proportion should be observed, she said, although “you might be able to get away with a huge, beautifully framed mirror with just a couple of really wonderful chairs in the room. That could be very elegant.”

It could also be very heavy. Mirrors, Sandlin said, require heavy-duty mounting materials, and the largest mirrors may need double hangers. Any bolt sunk into the wall should ideally be set into a stud, said Sandlin, and the hanging wire strung across the back of the mirror should be thick enough to easily support the weight.

Also, Sandlin said, mirrors should not be hung from such a height that they might fall on small children in an earthquake.

Finally, he said, mirrors that are applied directly to walls should be done by a professional only, and any sharp edges should be properly finished.

And, again, they should never be installed over the bed. All except for you, Geraldo.