Earlier this week we talked about cool and warm people. This is different.
Mike bought two beautiful brown modern couches and then a soft blue rug to go in front of them. Something wasn’t right in his living room, but he didn’t know what it was. Laura wanted to paint her bedroom green, and ended up doing it three times, but was still not happy. Sarah is a lawyer, and she wanted to be safe, so she went with a lot of neutrals in her apartment. Then she wished it all had more color, but didn’t feel comfortable deciding where to put the color. She didn’t want to screw it up...
Color is powerful. It is stimulating, healing, soothing and fun. It is also a big commitment. With the money that you spend on your average living room, buying an armchair in a colorful fabric can be downright terrifying. If it doesn’t work, you are up the creek. That is why most people just follow the cow path of color towards beige and stay there forever. Not that there is anything wrong with beige! It is a fine neutral color; it just shouldn’t ever rule your apartment...
In order to make good choices with color you only need to know a few things. Here they are:
1. There are warm and cool colors
The interior palette is roughly divided between these two groups of color and they are pretty self explanatory. Reds, yellows, oranges and beige or creamy colors are WARM. Blues, greens and grays are COOL. If you look at the color wheel – which you may remember from elementary school – the warm colors are on one side of the wheel and the cools on the other. Where they meet, they mix forming some hybrids. Green and Purple are the hybrids, and they can be warmer or cooler depending on their mix. For example a lime green has a lot of yellow in it and is warm, whereas a Kelly green has more blue in it and runs cool.
2. Warm colors are stimulating
The reds, oranges, yellows and all the off whites that tend to this direction possess all the qualities of warmth in that they are hot, stimulating and soothing to our emotions, which crave warmth. This is the reason red is the most successful color in our consumer society and found in such icons as Coca-Cola, Ferrari, and red lipstick.
Warm colors are therefore best in social rooms of your house, such as the living room, dining room and kitchen.
3. Cool colors are calming
The blue side of the spectrum along with cool browns and grays and the cool off whites possess all of the qualities of coolness in their ability to calm our emotions and focus our thoughts. While our heart may crave warmth, our head and our thoughts crave coolness in order to its best work. This is why the cool blues are the most popular color for men’s business suits and shirts, as well as police uniforms, why the old time bank teller wore a green visor, and why the Yankees are considered gentlemen in their blue pinstripes, whereas the Red Sox are emotional barbarians (not this year).
Cool colors are therefore best in the rooms where concentration and calmness are most important, such as the bedroom, office, and nursery (and I would throw in the bathroom as well).
4. A short note on black and white
Thought both black and white do not count as colors per se, they do have warm and cool properties, which is sometimes surprising. White is cool and black is warm. Therefore, remember that when you paint a room straight white, it is going to need a lot of color or other warmth element to make it physically comfortable, whereas black is instantly warm and needs to be used sparingly so that it doesn’t overwhelm. A little black will go a long way.
5. A short note on neutral colors
Neutral colors are like mutts; they are mixes where no strong color is evident. Since all colors tend to make brown, neutrals cover a dizzyingly vast landscape of browns that run from the warm, red brown of milk chocolate, to the cooler taupes and stone colors, to the light beige off whites. Neutrals are rarely exciting in their own right, but they become very exciting and sophisticated with put together with one another and with a starring color in their midst. I recommend getting to love the wide array of neutral colors and using them liberally as a base for any room.
6. Putting color to use…be consistent!
With all this in mind, when you design a room, you need to decide in advance what kind of an effect you want in the room, whether it is going to be predominantly warm or cool and then stick to your guns. Don’t paint your kitchen green (cool) when you have a terracotta floor (warm) and gold finish hardware (warm). Don’t put down a blue carpet (cool) in your living room if you have brown couches and off white walls (warm). Don’t mix warm and cool palettes unless you want your room to be purposefully funky or off beat.
7. The 80/20 rule
Then use strong color sparingly to punctuate the room, not define it. I recommend 80% neutral colors and 20% strong colors. Just like a woman’s face is made up with bright lipstick in a small portion of her face and neutral colors in the rest, so should a room be balanced. For example, in a warm living room such as Mike’s, I would recommend off white walls (warm/neutral) to go with his rich, brown couches (warm/neutral) and then a deep red rug (warm/color) and colorful table lamps in either black, silver or reds to wake up the room. Small batches of color have a tremendous effect on the whole and will “wake up” and bring out the more neutral colors around them. For example, take a look at this print ad for Ralph Lauren. It is a beautiful example of how he has used the color red in the words “Polo” to bring to life the neutral clothing and model behind. The red color brings out the warmth of these clothes.
With this approach, you treat color as the star of your show and don’t want to have too many stars. A few well placed pillows, lamps, rugs, flowers, curtains or single chairs with color on them is all a room needs. The rest should be filled with supporting members of the cast: neutrals.
Now you know what to do to solve Mike’s rug problem, why Laura had trouble painting her bedroom green (too much yellow in the green – needed to go towards blue green/sage), and how Sarah could confidently finish off her living room with color (warm pillows and a lampshade). Of course, color can get much more complicated than this, but these are the basics. And the basics work. If you start here and begin to open your eyes to the colors around you – what works and what doesn’t – you will start to see the patterns emerge, and you will start to more and more expert with using color in your home.
(ReEdited from 2004-11-02 - MGR)
I loved this article! I wanted to add that it's also important to remember that warm colors advance and cool colors recede. If you have a small room, and you want it to appear larger, a cool colors will do the trick. Conversely, if you have a large room and want it to appear cozier, a darker color makes sense.
what do you think about a red wall in the office? just one red wall for that feng shui money thing?
I've painted houses (interior and exterior), painted sets, and (in ill-advised moments of largesse) helped friends with painting apartments for years. I have something of a love-hate relationship with painting. Here are some random thoughts culled from my experience...
Paint a test first. Unless you've used them a lot,the sample paint chips are a waste of time. Get ready to invest an at least a few quarts. Just slap it on the wall and let it dry (near a window or next to a prominent piece of furnitre like a headboard is best). Plus, benjamin moore now sells little sample sizes of paint, which I wholly recommend. Even if they don't have the precise color you want, get the closest one. Or what you think is the closest-- you're gonna be surprised when it's on your wall.
Be patient. Buy as many samples as you need. Sometimes you'll hate your sample immediately. Just as often, though, it'll take a few days for you to really understand the color in the room. Why? because...
There is no such thing as color. Only light. This isn't entirely true, of course, but if you understand the concept you're well on your way to having a room you like. You're eye doesn't actually see the pigment, it sees the light rays that bounce off it. Who cares, you say? You will. Daylight is blue... cloudy light, bluer still. Incandescent light is yellow (light bulbs), fluourescent is green. Your walls will literaly change color when lit at different times, from different sources. Moreover, the more complex and sublte the color the more pronounced this effect. Imagine- fire-engine red is fire-engine red no matter what time of day or light. On the other hand, I've had to point out the the subtle contrast in white molding to someone who was certain their subtle grey walls hadn't been painted at all. Which leads me to...
Learn to love gray. Forget the battleship image - "gray" is actually something of an umbrella covering a wealth of subtle colors. Gray can tend to green, blue, lavender, almost anything. Gray can be warm or cool. If you change a piece of art or funiture, a nice, elegant greay paint can absorb the change. (And as for white... no one even agress on what "pure" white paint is. There are dozens and dozens of whites. For those of you who want white, I'd still recommend buying a few whites and painting them on your walls. You'll see the difference. I try not to paint friends' walls white because I think getting white right is simply too hard.)
In my experience, really strong colors are great for a few months but people tire of them within a year. The more subtle the color, the more it becomes part of the lansdcape of the space and the longer you'll like it. Use furniture and art for bold colors. (or try 'em in bathrooms or kitchens...)
Finally, buy those "designer home" magazines and REALLY look at the walls. Pay attention to them- what makes the paint look good in rooms you like? The color? The molding?? Are there plants? Or (most likely) was the photograph painstakingly lit? I cannot tell you how many times someone's given me a photograph of a room (like the one on this article) and said "I want that color," and I have to point out that, more often than not, they don't want that color, they want that light. Or the furniture. Or that the photograph is a little overexposed to punch the color. I say, imagine your room with no furntiure, four cramped walls, painted your desired color with nothing but your overhead bulb lighting the room. Still want that color?
I'd say more but I gotta run. hope this helps.
Wow, Peter certainly is a good writer. And his insights about paint make sense.
I've been angsting over what colors to paint my walls. The ceilings took two days, the furniture is all askew, the decorating books from the library decorate the cluttered surfaces, and the abundant paint sample cards I picked up are here somewhere in this chaos.
The good news is this: I'm forgetting about those richer colors and thinking more about what Peter said about grey. My problem is that I want warm AND cool. Any suggestions?
~Jane 6/28/06
~Jane
Help - I just bought a new AU Marie couch-bed from Jensen-Lewis in VeePeat (beige) microfiber and have put it in the same place my old black leather sofa sat. It looks huge. It is bigger by about 10 inches in the seat (due to the bed) but I thought a neutral color would make it unnoticeable. Now I am so unhappy. All the rest of my furniture looks disproportionate. Is there anything I can do to make the couch recede? Otherwise, a return is going to set me back $400.
view Serious10012's profile
peter, great comments.
i also love grey. i painted my living room with a warm grey and since have convinced about 50% of my friends to go with greys.
view xjessicax's profile
Serious, a neutral only makes the couch vanish if its surroundings are roughly the same neutral -- either the same color (with some range to be lighter or darker) or other neutrals in the same intensity (say, an equivalent gray).
I'm almost ready to abolish the term "neutral" entirely, since many a so-called neutral clashes with other neutrals and stands out against white walls. Just call it a Main Color, which exists to make the room look well-proportioned and well-lit, as well as to settle down the furniture, so it'll be a color that blends with your largest sections of wood (but orange and violet do that, if you choose the right ones, so it's not that you need beige). Then you have a Secondary Color, maybe an Accent Color, and a Touch of Black (or near-black).
Mid-century Modernism likes "neutrals" as the main color, but Victorians did the same 80/20 schemes without any neutrals at all.
view wende in the twin cities's profile
The major pieces of furniture in my bedroom are a dark steel grey, and I love it. The bright red side table and yellow-green filing cabinet weren't chosen with nearly as much care, but don't look so bad all considered.
I also admit I chose my summer and winter bedding to match the seasons - blue and white stripes for summer, cream on cream stripes for winter... (I like stripes)
view elchan's profile
Good general info on color.
However, I do think the following statement is biased and innaccurate:
"why the Yankees are considered gentlemen in their blue pinstripes, whereas the Red Sox are emotional barbarians (not this year)."
Unless someone is personally viewing both uniforms - in every variation of light conditions and background colors, the coolness or warmth of the colors would not be accurate.
view Downeast Suzy's profile
Very interesting article. I'm a designer and spend half my waking life mulling over color combinations. While I agree with most of the article, I take issue with the notion that all rooms should be either entire warm or entirely cool. Personally, I find all-warm or all-cool rooms a bit oppressive on either spectrum. I love a room dominated by cool blues having punches of warm reds or oranges. Perhaps I'm just "funky" or "off-beat".
Where's the discussion on complementary colors and how they can richness and life to a color scheme?
view kellylc's profile
The gnarly MS Paint color wheel makes this article.
I remember watching What Not to Wear once and Stacy and Clinton spoke about how red can be used as a neutral. Kind of an interesting idea. I don't really like red, but think that red combined with charcoal gray is divine.
view mmadden's profile
I agree with Wende in Pheonix. Having grown up in a home filled with tans and greys, I am ready to throw "neutral" to the wind and use COLOR! We've lived in our colorful apt for a year now and still love it, and I get nothing but compliments from guests who pass through.
Interestingly, I inherently followed many of the warm/cool suggestions outlined above: our living room and hallways are yellows and tans (warm) but our office, bedroom and den are greens and blues (cool). It just made sense to me. I also painted walls that got less natural light with brighter colors; the light-filled rooms are paler.
I've also tried to be really precise about what I place in each room, though we have a lot of hand-me-down furniture and had to choose paints according to what would be in that room instead of the other way around. It took us ages to figure out what to paint our den and, after 10 paint swatch squares on the wall and much agony, realized that nothing was working because we weren't choosing colors based on our red sofa. Once we made that shift in thought, the wall color came naturally and now I'm really thrilled with the room, where the sofa is the brightest thing (the walls are a sagey green).
view Eliza's profile
I just wanted to jump in and add a thanks to Peter for his insights and excellent writing skills. I actually copied and pasted your comments into my "When We Paint the House" file. Thanks!
view akbuilt's profile
These comments are great. I'm also trying to figure out how best to deal with color in a studio apartment, where you may want to define different areas through color. Any ideas? (Sofa area = warm, bed area = cool seems a little simplistic and hard to do well in a small space). I like kellylc's ideas about cool rooms with warm punches.
view betsbillabong's profile
Betsbillabong --
I faced exactly the same issue when I moved into a studio this August. I think I pulled off a successful space by:
1. working with the existing butter color on the walls and the warm brown hardwood floors;
2. embracing the colors I simply love - pink and teal
3. defining eating, lounging and sleeping spaces through "dividers" rather than color. I used a bookshelf to create a "hallway" to the bathroom, for example, and my very tall headboard separates the sleeping area from the entryway (the headboard faces the front door, if that makes any sense).
The overall effect of the apartment is warm and soothing. I generally avoided cool colors after testing them out and seeing that they simply didn't work in the space. Trial and error, yay.
In a studio, if you overthink color you may end up with a jumbled color story, or too many neutrals. Defining spaces through color is certainly a good idea - I'd really like to see you pull it off successfully! Good luck.
view mmadden's profile
I found this article very interesting, but I'm a little worried now because I've been planning to do my living/dining area in shades of blue and brown. I've seen those colors combined well; is it just a question of pairing the right browns and blues?
view sprite's profile
When we were renovating the family house (late 19th/early 20th century house in a small town in the Catskills, lucky us) I brought a bunch of paint samples with me on a visit and made big splotches on various walls so I could look at colours in various lights at different times of day. My father came up about a week later, after I'd gone, and truly thought for a while that vandals had broken into the house! It had never occurred to me to tell him that I'd done it, or why, and apparently when he was growing up you had white walls or wallpaper. None of this throwing on great swaths of colour to see which red was the right one (the front hall and stairwell are a rich warm welcoming red, and I must say on a cold crisp day it is very nice).
view Deborah's profile
Sprite -
I'd say go for it. Brown and blue, when chosen and executed correctly, are classic and sophisticated. Try using accents of coral, red or another warm color to liven up the space and avoid falling asleep at dinner! :D
Red/orange/yellow table settings might look especially nice.
view mmadden's profile
I have a chocolate brown and blue (more aqua) dining room and it's not a sleepy room at all. I would hate to think what it would look like with coral and red accents. It would take away from the blue. The room does border on the red living room. Maybe that helps. I never thought of it as cold or sleepy. It feels refined and elegant. I also don't agree with painting walls neutral. I love color and if I tire of my walls being a color I can always repaint. When I bought my house everything was painted builder's beige and the colors I've brought into the house have awakened it and made it fun. I don't like the idea of telling people who have never painted rooms they should only paint in neutrals (shades of beige, brown, or gray). I think it would be depressing without shades of yellow, blue, purple, and greens. Painting walls is fun, seeing the room come alive. You don't get that with taupes and beiges, you just don't. That said I'm not saying to paint everything in primary or loud colors. There's a subtlety to making rooms with colors all work together.
view Lorie09's profile
Maybe this is too late in the thread to get a response, but here's a question that's been bugging me for a year. Warm colors are energetic and stimulating, cool colors are calming and recede. BUT, warm colored LIGHT helps you to relax and get ready for sleep, while cool blue light helps to wake you up. Can someone reconcile these different phenomena?
view Sea's profile
Peter, you'd better come back and say more! Your comments (in addition to this article's) are extremely useful. I've already tried the advice to imagine the room I'm going to paint empty, with a naked bulb lighting it, and each new color on the walls. That weeded some out fast.
So, if it's not just the color, but the color in the particular lighting in a picture that one likes, what's to prevent duplicating both? Obviously, one can't create southern light in a north-facing room, but excepting that, artificial lighting can be "designed." Or maybe a person could settle on the room's lighting first, and then try out the colors?
I used to pick room colors with great abandon: sometimes the results were brilliant, and other times I don't want to discuss. One night I was adding turmeric to a bubbling pot of something, and I fell in love with the color of the spice. So I painted a big room that really intense, saturated, dark reddish orange color. It was beautiful in the room's light, but I'd neglected to consider the room's large, black marble and stamped iron fireplace/hearth. Halloween, guys.
I'm having a terrible time with this room. Do you do consulting, Peter?
view Aulaire's profile
Thanks mmadden. I was thinking of raspberry accents for a little pop. We will see. :)
view sprite's profile
BUT, warm colored LIGHT helps you to relax and get ready for sleep, while cool blue light helps to wake you up.
That's a biologically ingrained response to sunset (warm-colored light, end of day) versus sunrise (cool light, wake up!).
Reconciling it with the warm=energetic, cool=calming color advice is more difficult, especially as there's a shade of pink (warm color) that's used in prisons to calm people. It's actually easier to defend BRIGHT colors as being energetic and MUTED colors as being soothing, regardless of warmth or coolth.
In A Pattern Language, Chris Alexander says homes should be decorated in warm colors, period. He's very much against the grays that are presently seen as "sophisticated" -- those aren't homey and comfortable. He's in gray, rainy Oregon, though.
Sort of conversely, Lynette Jennings (whose paint scheme advice is so useful) advocates choosing your "neutrals" from your local environment, which would make grays perfect for NYC.
Cool colors will make your ambient light bluer (feeling cooler) and warm colors colors will make it yellower (feeling warmer), which is why I liked our yellowish-white paint in gray, foggy SF but am surprisingly happy with a blue/gray off-white here in Phx.
view wende in the twin cities's profile
Ah! Thanks, Wende. Very interesting. And you've provided lots more to think about, color-wise....
view Sea's profile
check out the site Myperfectcolor.com you can view all colors across all the brands on your screen and they will sell you a pint size can in anycolor you want to test it out. They will also modify it for you lighter or darker by diffrent percentages at check out. They aslo have top selling lists which helps in picking out colors. Anyway great topic thanks
I found this usefull from this site:
Top Selling Warm Neutrals and Beiges
1 HC-45 Shaker Beige
2 HC-39 Putnam Ivory
3 HC-44 Lenox Tan
4 HC-35 Powell Buff
5 HC-34 Wilmington Tan
6 HC-38 Decatur Buff
7 1066 Barely Beige
8 AC-4 Yosemite Sand
9 1074 Alpaca
10 1068 Squire Hill Buff
Top Selling Cool Neutrals & Gray-Greens
1 HC-26 Monroe Bisque
2 HC-80 Bleeker Beige
3 HC-81 Manchester Tan
4 HC-27 Monterey White
5 HC-30 Philadelphia Cream
6 HC-28 Shelburne Buff
7 HC-29 Dunmore Cream
8 HC-77 Alexandria Beige
9 HC-98 Providence Olive
10 HC-79 Greenbrier Beige
Top 50 Selling Benjamin Moore Colors
Rank Color Number Color Name
1 HC-45 Shaker Beige
2 HC-39 Putnam Ivory
3 HC-44 Lenox Tan
4 HC-35 Powell Buff
5 HC-34 Wilmington Tan
www.myperfectcolor.com/top-selling-paint-colors.
6 912 Linen White
7 HC-9 Chestertown Buff
8 HC-26 Monroe Bisque
9 HC-12 Concord Ivory
10 HC-80 Bleeker Beige
11 HC-81 Manchester Tan
12 HC-38 Decatur Buff
13 OC-17 White Dove
14 1066 Barely Beige
15 OC-85 Mayonnaise
16 HC-27 Monterey White
17 2153-50 Desert Tan
18 HC-30 Philadelphia Cream
19 HC-28 Shelburne Buff
20 2153-60 Rich Cream
21 HC-114 Saybrook Sage
22 2084-20 Maple Leaf Red
23 AC-4 Yosemite Sand
24 1074 Alpaca
25 2143-40 Beachside Green
26 2143-40 Camouflage
27 2144-40 Soft Fern
28 1068 Squire Hill Buff
29 1039 Stone House
30 HC-32 Standish White
31 2152-70 Mayonnaise
32 HC-118 Sherwood Green
33 1067 Blond Wood
34 925 Ivory White
35 2142-40 Dry Sage
36 HC-47 Brookline Beige
37 HC-4 Hawthorne Yellow
38 HC-29 Dunmore Cream
39 HC-77 Alexandria Beige
40 1073 Malton
41 HC-98 Providence Olive
42 2160-40 Roasted Sesame Seed
43 2152-50 Golden Straw
44 HC-48 Bradstreet Beige
45 199 Barley
46 HC-6 Windham Cream
47 HC-5 Weston Flax
48 HC-79 Greenbrier Beige
49 1037 Muslin
50 1101 Fennel Seed
view nowstarter's profile
I love grey-- grey has always been my favorite color. When we bought our first apartment this spring, I painted over the yellow walls with BM Silver Fox (below the molding) and Abalone (above the molding), and it looks fabulous with the crisp white molding, the lipstick-red accents, and our deep purply dining chairs.
However, the wall leading up to the upstairs is still a pale buttery yellow, and it looks weird with the grey downstairs. I'd like to paint it a different color that will still make the upstairs landing feel "sunshiny" but will go with the grey downstairs. I'm thinking of maybe a green, or a more ochre-y yellow, but whatever I pick has to go (or at least not clash) with the boring beige berber carper upstairs until we can afford to replace it. Any suggestions? I may have to write in with pictures...
view jeccat's profile