I was wondering if you were using ambient cubemap, but I couldn’t tell based on the screens. But yeah that’ll white wash the scene if you have the intensity too high. Subtlety is key when using ambient cubemaps or skylights, especially when indoor environments are concerned. You may also want to tone down your post processing ambient occlusion, it looks like you have some of that going based on your screenshot and that can give the room a darker look as well in the crevices/corners.
Can you show a screenshot of your lighting setup? You mentioned 16 lights, but that’s probably a bit overkill for a room of that size. You could get the same effect with 1 and playing around with the influence radius and maybe tweaking the light sources roughness a bit.