apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Ace Bandage Beige! That's a perfect description of a dreadful color. It would be on the same paint color strip as Calamine Pink.

my sister's college roomates painted their living room two toned. Two walls were effing turquoise and the other was granny smith apple green. Bleh.

when I moved into my house our dining room was painted baby poop brown. It was so ugly, and in the dining room, not exactly appetizing!

Our office just painted the backsplash of our kitchen highlighter orange, truly electric, fluorescent orange.
It looks great in such a small dose but I cannot imagine a larger dose of it. A few square feet of that color is definitely enough.

Ace Bandage Beige is the only one I agree with.

Pepto pink.
Landlord Brown and Yellow.
Any color that appeared on a grammar school wall in the late 60s/early 70s.

Actually, I think bright orange and chartreuse can work quite well in controlled amounts in the kitchen, which seems to be more forgiving of bright colors than other rooms. Judging by the response to these posts, a lot of people agree with me:

orange cabinets

orange backsplash

Agreed about the primary blue though - it always makes me think of elementary school.

I disagree. I think any color can look good in the right space. The lighting, amount of wall space, ceiling height, direction the windows face, etc. all play too big a part to condemn any given color.

Hospital green makes everything look dingy; although, I suppose it would compliment calamine pink on the "dreadful" paint color strip that LilyC has started.

I'd like to see a post on what to do about ghastly colors when your landlord won't let you paint. Most of my walls are currently somewhere between "tenement hall beige" and "pancake batter yellow" (thank goodness at least the living room is white). I suspect I'm not the only one!

I once painted a family room orange and it looked like a crack house. Never a good look.

My living room is bright crayon-box orange. It works.

ANY colour can work, and I do mean ANY, depending on the space, the floors, the lighting and windows and the furniture. The bright orange is one of the best rooms in our home.

I've got an orange dining room (lots of deep chestnut wood on floors and trim to ground it) -- BM's Antelope Canyon, which my son called "Cantelope Canyon" -- and I tell myself it looks pretty good: warm, cheerful, cozy. I'm about to paint the sunny living room (same wood details) in a lemongrass green color (BM's Golden Delicious) which is not so far from chartreuse.... so I guess I'm batting 1.000 with AT! When I'm done painting the LR, I'll be sure to write back and tell you exactly how sickly I look in the reflected glow of all that green... : )

I have happy associations with all of the offending colors: granny apple green (looks great with black picture frames); bright orange (we call it tangerine and it breathes vitality); calamine pink (another happy color, the color of candy floss and great with taupe); primary blue (looks very sharp with black); used lettuce green for matting on prints.

sea foam green. found in bridesmaid dresses and bathrooms.

I want the turquoise and granny-smith room!

There's no such thing as a "Bad Color" - but there are certainly bad color choices.

Given the right fabrics, lighting and other colors/materials in a room - even the colors folks list here can look great.

My office is painted orange -- it was supposed to be a terracotta, but it turned out a little bit brighter orange than I'd thought. I really like it, especially since I live somewhere where the winters are long and dark; it brightens up the room quite a bit.

I get a lot of positive comments on it. I also get people who say, "I could never live with it, but it is bright!"

I have yet to see an attractive brown room.

i have a close friend who had painted her room a VERY bright pink- worse than the pepto pink (seriously i cant be in there for long, it physically hurts)

the twist is that all this time she thought it was a nice deep Rosey- Fuchsia - turns out she had disconnected retinas that made her see things just a bit different. she's fine now, but needless to say, she is considering repainting. :)

Pepto pink makes me dizzy and I once saw a room that was a dark olive green. So dingy!

I once painted my horrible nyc kitchen bright orange - it was dreadful. It lasted about 3 months before I mustered up the energy to redo it and the cabinets...I used to call it "home depot logo orange" - one of my worst color mistakes ever...and there have been a few including a "sand" that looked more like that pepto bismol pink you refer to...

i think orange walls are great. you just need to pick the right orange.
one of the walls in our living room is an orange and i think it looks really great!.

Absolutely disagree about orange and chartreuse (though the mere mention of "Ace bandange beige" does depress me). My dining room is chartreuse and bedroom/living area is pretty much undeniably "crayon-box orange." I love it, and the only detractor I've heard of was my dad, who was unconvinced while helping me paint but eventually came around.

http://flickr.com/photos/racharoo/2462591195/in/set-72157600183873978/

Bright, screaming yellow can look really awful. Same goes for mustard yellow.

And lime green makes my eyes bleed. Spring green, fine, but lime has too much yellow in it.

cantaloupe.

Especially when combined with something like BM's clearest ocean blue (20) and the above honey bee yellow. (my sister-in-law's palette)

yellow.

and yes, ace bandage.

Pretty much anything beige.

Deep forest green with hunter red and pancake makeup beige (the "traditional" colour scheme)

I love colour. LOVE colour. One day, I chucked school school for art school just so that I could play with colours. But of late I have come to the conclusion that by and large, we don't use colours well in interiors. I still love strong saturated colours, like Yves Klein blue, and would not hesitate to use in the right space, and have successfully painted my daughter's room fuschia, but I am much more circumspect about wall colour these days. Especially in how rooms relate to one another.

We spent our summer vacation in Scandinavia, and stayed for a week in a summer hotel on the Danish island of Bornholm run by a married couple of design partners. The pared-down aesthetic felt wonderful. As a result, these days, I want white walls most of all (the perfect Donald Kaufman white), and many-coloured rooms seem "too much".

The Dutch (who do great orange rooms!) and the Belgian (a 3 day-old lentil soup greige, for example) colour sense still beckons though.

the pink my roommate had chose for our bathroom. ugh.

My kitchen is orange (Sherwin Williams 'Exciting Orange') - in the morning light, it's exactly the color of ripe canteloupe, at night, with the lamps on, it's a warm terra cotta. I hate/abhor/despise overhead lighting, so the brightness of the color under fluorescents isn't a problem.

Worst color? Cobalt blue - my mother painted our kitchen that color (with paisley!! wallpaper) in the 70s. And believe it or not, that exact same color was the trim for the entire upstairs of our apartment when we moved in (500 miles and 30 years later.) Flat white walls, high-gloss cobalt blue trim, and mustard/brown flecked carpet. I know you all wish you were me.

Mauve!

I work in an office where the bathroom is painted in a combination of dark yellow and brown. yuck!

When we bought our house, the front bedroom (which had previously been a baby's room) was painted the exact color of those cheapy, off-brand band aids.

That poor baby.

Ace Bandage Beige - that's a good one.

Basically any wall colour that evokes memories of flesh. A friend of mine moved into a duplex she dubbed "Shades of Bruise". It was beige, purply-beige, and pinky-beige. Oh, and this dusty yellow colour in the bathroom. Yeugh.

Crayon blue looks great if it's paired with lots of white, and located within eyesight of the Aegean. Greek homes use this color all the time with great success.

So much of this is about the names, and the associations they conjure.

Ace Bandage Beige and Pancake Makeup Beige both sound horrific. As does baby poop brown. Add to that paint strip Barbie Doll Flesh-Color, and Dirty Danskin Tights, and you've got yourself a formidable weapon of color and words.

Weird historical note: At the Folger Shakespeare Library, there's a wonderful old 16th century book on coloring engravings of flowers translated from Dutch into English that suggests using a "sadde yellow," for daffodil greens, which the translator explains in the preface is really a polite way of translating "shitty Yellow."

my mother painted the first floor windowless bathroom in my parents' home a deep spicy orange color that she loves... nobody bothered to tell her the trick about going a bit (or in this case it should have been a LOT) lighter when picking a paint color. It's literally like taking a pee in a pumpkin.

Ditto on gryt's "I have yet to see an attractive brown room." In my last house, when a roommate moved out and I took over her room, it was a horrible brown color. Painted over it in a bright, warm "oops rack" yellow and it made a world of difference (also helped "exorcise the demons" she'd left). The same house had all the common rooms and hallways painted Ace Bandage Beige - by the landlords or the roommate, I'm not sure. It was horrible.

I once painted a bedroom a pale-ish neon green (kind of a mistake, I was going for a pale sage instead), and it actually worked. It was bright and cheerful. It helped that the room was just big enough for a twin bed and a desk, and the whole length of the exterior wall was windowed.

My current house is painted shades of grey (credit for that goes to my husband, who decorated his bachelor pad appropriately for him, and then we met....), and I have to say I will never, ever, paint another wall grey as long as I live. I hate living in a grey house. It's depressing and colorless.

Hello - I have an alcove studio (L-shaped) in Manhattan. My bed in the L area. I was thinking of making the wall against the headboard a nice accent wall - paint it Magenta - would that be too much!!

I saw Magenta accent wall in a house in Germany - but that house had high loft ceilings, mine are only 9ft high.

Please advise.

SAG

I was scarred for life by "duck on a stick" mauve and grey/blue from the eighties.

Just before I moved out of my ex's house during our divorce I painted my bedroom battleship grey. It was horrid.

I like greys in theory and in pictures but living with them always makes me feel cold and rejected. I much prefer the warmth of browns....therefore I disagree with the " never seen a good brown room" thought. My living room and dining room walls in my 500 sq ft home are deepest coffee brown and they are wonderful. Like a hug when you come home.

Blues of any description never seem to work at all. They seem to come across as too bright or dingy.

To the last post. You are probably picking your greys way to dark. In a bathroom, I would use a very light blue or green grey. Grey is fantastic.

As for brown, it can be beautiful if it is an ultra-light cafe, or a committed chocolate, but ace bandage never works.

Blue is a fantastic color if you grey it down.

I have found, that if it looks good on a shirt, it probably won't look good on your wall. People tend to choose wall colors that are highly saturated and that works in a bathroom, or kitchen, or even dining room, where there is little to no furniture or clutter as the focal point, so the wall serves that purpose. But in any other room, your wall should compliment your living space, not dominate it.

Hence, stay away from colors that you would buy in a shirt.

Years ago I had just moved into the house I still live in and for a variety of reasons needed to get it looking good fast. In the bathroom, I did a fake chair rail using black duct tape (this was in the late 1980s); the top was white and the bottom was a good turquoise. It looked fine for what it was. Later, when I went back to re-do, I thought that since I really loved the turquoise, why not do the whole bathroom? After doing it, the first morning, looking in the mirror, my face was a sickly blue green. I quickly changed it out to a skin tone (which for me is a peachy/orange/browny kind of color, actually a wash so it's a couple of different tones). The turquoise became the front of the closet door in the bathroom. The moral of the story is: a little turquoise goes a long way and it is not flattering reflecting itself on the face in the bathroom.

Can anyone recommend a nice near-white color that works with NYC light? When I moved into my current apartment, the walls alternated between mustard yellow and poopy brown. I painted the living room a sunny yellow, which I now hate. I then chose Ralph Lauren "Fine Linen" for dining room, and was planning to repaint the living room the same color, but after reading these posts I'm thinking "Fine Linen" probably looks like the dreaded pancake-batter yellow. I don't know if I can stand going through another bad choice on my walls, so I'd appreciate suggestions.

How color is perceived has everything to do with light. Does anyone know if there's a place to go to see which colors work best with which (direction of) light? My place has windows on only one side -- facing North. I'd love to know which colors work best with Northern light.

Hi,

I think there's validity for some colors but I guess I'm not sure about the bright (crayon-box) orange. I used an orange for a major wall in my Oakland loft which seems bright but may not but. You be the judge.

http://www.pbase.com/suirad/image/35779902

Cheers!

ya know, many of the tenants of our building recently got together and repainted our co-op's lobby and hallways and stairwells and walls with two of the colors above.

looks awful. ooh boy. we used (from the middle row) the last color on the right for the walls and the 2nd color from the right for the stairs, doors, and handrails. Oh, dear!

too late now. we just don't have the funds to repaint for a while.

I have to agree with those who say there is no color that is truly impossible. In the right space, with the right light, in the right dose - any color can work. That is the beauty of the alchemy of color.

My daughter's bedroom is pepto pink (I am not ashamed to say it!) and the morning light coming into the room makes it positively glow, it is gorgeous.

Chartreuse? Fabulous color! Pinky beige - a classic and very heartwarming if used correctly. Primary blue is a wonderful accessory color, can make a room pop.

Coincidentally, I have a post today that shows a bright orange kitchen (walls) - it looks great:

http://retrorenovation.com/2008/09/13/a-countertop-made-out-of-a-bowling-alley/

I thought my long hallway would look cool painted burnt orange. It dried traffic-cone orange instead. I thought I couldn't hate it more than I already did until my friend likened it to being inside someone's upper intenstine.

Mauve--you would think it's great, but most of the time it just looks "putty purple". It's like that color you get when you have mixed together too many kinds of paint in art class. Yuck.

50s Pam, that orange is the color in my hallway (with white trim and ceiling). i love it!

I just recently moved out of a friend's house, which he had painted crayon box orange, neon cerulean, chartreuse, and primary yellow, with silver ceilings and dark grey trim. It was really actually pretty nice... (The chartreuse was on the edge, but the only room totally green was the foyer...)

Now, I am in a (very blah) medium beige apartment, which I am not allowed to paint, but which I have been painting anyway (so far, icy blue in the bathroom). I figure I can paint it back at the end if the landlord insists - I'm counting on it looking nice enough that he won't ask me to!