White walls: Get thee behind me Satan!

May 20, 2008

A very good friend of mine moved into the apartment above mine a couple of weeks ago. More on that later, but in the meantime she's having fun decorating. Right now she has paint chips taped to her walls. I'm so jealous.

When I moved in three years ago, I painted the bedroom and bathroom, then eventually the kitchen. I've never painted the living room or the front hall, because I just didn't have the time or the money. Plus the landlord had left it freshly painted in Linen White.

I am so over it.

Color me!

July 10, 2007

When I moved into my apartment two years ago, it had been painted top to bottom in Benjamin Moore's Linen White paint. In flat. (Right. Try cleaning that once it's scuffed by a ton of garden materials dragged through the apartment.)

I'm a big Ben Moore fan, and particularly like linen white, but I changed a few things—periwinkle blue in the bedroom, a red wall in the living room, apple green in the kitchen, and seafoam blue in the bathroom. But I left the entry hallway and most of the living room white, mainly because I wanted to go for a pared-down modern look and I just didn't have the energy to paint the whole place.

Well, white just isn't going to cut it anymore. So I need your help.

Colorfully fearless: geometric bathroom

August 2, 2006

With all the near-disasters I've been talking about here lately, I thought it was time for a positive post. And another look at color in my small home.

This is my bathroom. What you see here is likely the original tile from the late 1930s, early 1940s. Black and white (or cream, as it is here) tile is very common from this period, and I wouldn't have been able to change it anyway. So I had a limited color palette to work with.

As I've mentioned before, I like cool colors in bathrooms and bedrooms, because I consider these places you want to feel relaxed. So I chose this pale bluish green, which is very calming. (I think its Benjamin Moore's Ocean Spray—2047-60—but I'm not sure.)

But that's just the base color. Then I had my talented friend, Jim Sperber, take a look. A long time ago I taught him how to do basic decorative painting, but he's far surpassed me since then. He's begun incorporating some of his abstract art into his interior work, and the result is amazing. For my bathroom, he decided to try something new, based on a geometric series of paintings he'd done a few years ago. He chose a pearlescent artist's paint as the over coat, which took the ocean spray down a notch and pulled in the cream colors of the tile. Then he painted concentric trapezoids on all the walls.

I love this room—it has texture, and depth of color. The underlying blue is calming; the overlay of paint and shapes adds flourishes of decoration. Now I'm just trying to figure out what else Jim could paint for me in his inimitable style…

Colorfully fearless: Alex's ’70s kitchen solution

May 31, 2006

This is my kitchen, the best I can do—with what started out as a dingy, dark, outdated space—on a renter's budget.

Painting the cabinets and scrubbing the floors were a given. Adding pulls made sense of the traditional panelled cabinet doors. There wasn't much I could change about the bland white appliances. But oh, dear, what to do with the rust-orange laminate counters? Without the money to change them to some luscious granite, I had to give in and and work with them.

If the best defense is a good offense, then I figured choosing a totally contrasting color for the backsplash is the way to go. This one is Benjamin Moore's grape green—for the walls (not yet painted) I plan to go two shades lighter on the same card with light daffodil.

Most people blanched when I told them what I was going to do, but they end up loving it when they see it for real. It's the only way to make the colors feel whimsical instead of tired. The tea towels (from The Art of Cooking, a local kitchen shop) were the inspiration for the palette, and also the conduit for bringing it all together. In fact, when my window obsession is finished (see "What it means to be 'obsessed,'" earlier—the window is on the right of this picture) I plan to paint the whole archway around it the same grape green. Create a focal point. Bring joy and energy to a room where I spend a lot of time.

E-mail us your colorfully fearless room.

Colorfully fearless: Alex's Bedroom

May 22, 2006

I'm a big supporter of being daring with color in the home, but it wasn't always that way. For years, I kept my walls boring white and tried to decorate using throw pillows and upholstery. I was too afraid to commit to a particular palette. But what actually happened was that my place became very cluttered with things that were trying to be decoration.

Then, after almost 10 years in white hell, I decided to mix it up a bit. I painted the living room a cloth-distressed bright yellow ochre and the bedroom a calming periwinkle blue. The effect was astounding. My place looked more formal, yet more fun—more like me in many ways. I've since learned, through stories in TOH like this one, a lot about how color has a profound effect on the way we feel, physically and emotionally—like that blues and greens are calming while reds and yellows more enlivening to the senses.

This is a picture of my bedroom. I've carried a lot of the colors from my old places to my current apartment, including the periwinkle blue, which is a great bedroom color because it makes the room feel so relaxing. This time, though I've added some orange to pop against the blue and green theme. The painting, called "Off-Season Smoothie" by my friend Jim Sperber, was the crowning touch, pulling it all together. Visitors always comment on the colors in that room, and I think it's the perfect representation of my style.

So here's an invitation: show us your colorfully fearless room, and we'll post it here. Or, if you're still a little colorfully timid, send us a pic of your place and our readers can help you get ideas for how to bring out your daring side. Using great tools like TOH's Digital Designer, we can show you some ways to make it a whole new room, all for the price of a couple of gallons of color. Don't be afraid—it's only paint. You can always paint over it, you know.