The Elegant Way Joanna Gaines Transforms A Boring Ceiling To Make A Room Stand Out

There are plenty of places to flex your design skills around the house, including jumping on inspirational living room decor ideas, renovating an old bathroom with new and exciting tiling, or even investing in some of the flooring trends that are taking over in 2025. However, most of these decor projects impact lower areas in a room — leaving a boring, white ceiling hanging above. Luckily, Fixer Upper host and HGTV star Joanna Gaines tackled this ceiling blind spot in a creative way, by adding a circular trim to your ceiling.

In a lot of ways, the ceiling is an area of untapped potential for a home. Partly this is because painting and decorating a room's ceiling can be a polarizing project — one filled with a lot of common painting mistakes that people make on their ceilings. From making the room appear way too dark, or even making it seem smaller, there can be a lot to consider before sprucing up your ceiling. This is what makes Gaines' trim trick so useful. Instead of only relying on paint, adding a trim can help mitigate aesthetic risks by making the room look more intentional and put-together. 

In a renovation during Season 5 of Fixer Upper, Gaines renovated a home dubbed the Plain Jane house due to it's need of more excitement. During the renovation, she completely transformed the home's dining room ceiling with an intricate, circular ceiling treatment on top of a pastel blue paint job. "This ceiling treatment is meant to grab your attention, and it makes this smaller room actually feel larger and more elegant," Gaines wrote in a blog post about the renovation, before adding, "Adding a feature like this to a space in need of extra detail is a great way to make it stand out." While the blog didn't specify her exact methods, this project likely used rounded trim and moldings to build out the design for the ceiling. 

Gaines chose the circular look on purpose, too, specifying that, "By going with this circular design in a small square room, the corners are softened and your eye is drawn up, making the room feel bigger and more dramatic." She also added, "This space was previously a blank canvas, so adding this detail made a huge impact on the overall look and feel of this dining room." While this makes a lot of sense design-wise, it's important to note that you don't need to stick to the rounded look just to achieve a more interesting ceiling: plenty of homeowners are opting for trends like coffered ceilings, which create grid-like patterns instead.

Thankfully, creating your own unique ceiling isn't too hard. If you want to go the circular route, like Gaines' choice, you can even get a pre-made, chic round piece to affix to your ceiling and hang a light from. Circular ceiling mounts and medallions from stores like Home Depot often retail for under $100, and are easy to install. They also often come pre-painted with a white finish, saving you extra steps. In order to install a large piece, you can also find round molding or cut a circle into a wood plank to place onto your ceiling. 

For a more traditional look, you can also opt for coffered ceilings. YouTube creator Charleston Crafted used simple molding to make a grid on top of a popcorn ceiling, culminating in an elegant and timeless look that was relatively easy to put together. You could also consider painting those features white or a neutral color to tie everything together. In terms of painting the ceiling under your work, you should follow Gaines' advice and use the same paint you selected for the walls, "By taking the wall color up to the ceiling, it allowed for the wainscoting and the details in the trim work to really stand out—giving the space a more seamless look."