painting room with low ceilings.

I am about to paint a room with fairly low ceilings. I am looking for advice on how to make it look roomier. The room is sunny. It has a few intrusions like box for pipes on the ceilings and arch in the middle so it has multiple surfaces. One suggestions was to paint ceiling and a few inches of the wall white and the rest with my paint. The extreme version of the same approach is to put chair rail and paint everything above chair rail with “ceiling white” color. Another approach is to draw vertical stripes. Should I combine both approaches: white area at the top and vertical lines in places?