Interior Design Help Part 2

You may recall, about eight months ago I asked for help regarding painting my freshly rebuilt/drywalled upstairs. I ended up going with gray walls and white angled walls/ceiling.

Now it's time to paint the stairwell. I've completely gutted, re-studded, drywalled, and primed it, and I'm kind of torn on where to go from here. I was originally thinking white, then I thought it would look really cool to match the upstairs and do the vertical parts gray and the horizontal and angled parts white. But now that it's primed and all white, I'm afraid that the gray will be too dark in there, since it's kind of dark in there already. What would you do? Oh, and new treads and risers are going in after I paint. The treads will be stained in a medium cherry and the risers will be white. The 1x6 on both sides of the stair opening is the base of the banister, and will stay white regardless, to match the baseboards (that aren't up yet).

I'd leave it white since there are no lights in there (and there is already perfectly good paint on the walls), but then I'm strongly function-over-fashion when it comes to houses. Especially since the fashions change so fast and are so expensive to keep up with.

I would be tempted to go all white, but grey will hide the hand smudges better. Also I'm kind of anal, and that part of me says you have started a visual "system" and you should stick with it.

Needs more cowbell.

The white walls along the staircase will end up looking filthy. Go with the grey. It's not going to effect the lighting that much.

I'd be looking into running a little wired in LED strip light along the little overhang that runs longitudinally w/ the stairs.

Thanks all. I think I'll stick with the gray/white thing and see what happens. I mean, it's only paint, so if I don't like it I can change it pretty fast.