This has been a big week for us! Apartment Therapy — a site that has so much to say about color — went black-and-white. Along with many sites around the web, we’ve donated our color this week to raise awareness for National Painting Week (May 19–29), a week dedicated to the power of color and transformation where Sherwin-Williams will celebrate by donating to communities in need and completing projects during the month of May and all year long.
Despite what political pundits may lead you to believe, America is way more colorful than just a bunch of red and blue states. We took a look at data we’ve learned from Color Search — the ultimate tool powered by Sherwin-Williams® for using Apartment Therapy House Tours to find the perfect palette inspired — to see what colors every U.S. region really identifies with.
We don’t want to brag (much), but Color Search — the Sherwin-Williams® powered tool that helps you turn House Tour color schemes into your own paint palettes — is one of our favorite AT creations. We love making our HUGE archive of House Tour images even more useful to readers — and what’s more useful than turning someone’s real-life inspiration into your own real-life results?
Back in April, with the launch of Color Search 3.0, we introduced the new Search by Room tool which lets you pick a palette and specify a room to find color inspiration from our House Tours. After a few months (and thousands of Color Searches) we were curious to boldly go where no Color Searcher has gone before! We dove into all that data to see what the most popular Sherwin-Williams® Color Searches have been, room by room.
Erin and Jimmy are the kind of newlywed couple you’d love to hate, but they’re just too adorable. They sincerely enjoy each other’s company, share each other’s interests, and have countless other qualities that the rest of us are looking for on sites like WhyCantIFindMySoulmate.com. When they’re not making each other laugh or playing board games (no, really), they’re serious football fans who love watching the game with their friends.
Painting is one of our favorite quick decor fixes. It’s such a reliable way to personalize a home, to add character, sophistication and depth to a space. But easy as it is to buy paint and rollers and get color up on the walls, painting is not without its challenges, especially for renters who are often faced with reluctant landlords or stuck with previous tenants’ color choices.
Nature can be one of the best places to find color inspiration, and fall is is a great time to look for it. Rich reds, golden yellows, and deep greens are everywhere. Valspar Paint is ready to help you turn those inspirations into reality with five palettes for fall.A bright orange, used sparingly, brings just enough pop to enliven this mostly-neutral living room. The long, horizontal stripe on the wall keeps it looking clean.
Looking to add a little color to your home, but not sure which color would look right in your space? We found readers who had this same paint color dilemma, and asked them to try the Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap® Visualizer for web or iPad – an easy (and fun!) online tool that lets you upload a photo of your room and virtually “paint” the walls with different colors.
Looking to add a little color to your home, but not sure which color would look right in your space? We found readers who had this same paint color dilemma, and asked them to try the Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap® Visualizer for web or iPad – an easy (and fun!) online tool that lets you upload a photo of your room and virtually “paint” the walls with different colors.
Looking to add a little color to your home, but not sure which color would look right in your space? We found readers who had this same paint color dilemma, and asked them to try the Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap® Visualizer for web or iPad – an easy (and fun!) online tool that lets you upload a photo of your room and virtually “paint” the walls with different colors.
Prize: Saatva Luxury Firm Mattress Set (including foundation and frame) Value: $1,400 From: Saatva In an ideal world, you and your mattress would never have to part— you could work hard, play hard and Netflix hard all from the confines of your bed (I know, I know: some of us lucky ones already do). Being a social butterfly is nice and all, but lying around in bed all day is priceless. With a mattress from Saatva, you just might be tempted to sleep in, every single day.
Woodwork is a dream detail, but it can be a doozy to work around. With undertones ranging from yellow to red to gray, matching it is no one-size-fits-all task. Consider our Color Search tool, sponsored by Sherwin-Williams, your crystal ball: Will lavender paint look good with my dark wood trim? Is red right for oak crown molding? Let Color Search inspire you! Color Search also offers instant inspiration, with a treasure trove of real-life images.
Fashion is such a great resource for home style that we’ve combined two of our favorite Apartment Therapy features — our Fashionable People profiles, featuring chic House Tour subjects, and our Color Search tool, powered by Sherwin-Williams® — to help you find sartorial-meets-interior inspiration in a snap. Each of these lovely ladies has a rich, moody and distinctive color savvy that translates beautifully to the home. Which suits your style best?
Painting is easy. It’s knowing what color to paint that can be a challenge. We love the Sherwin-Williams Chip It!™ color selection tool that lets you find paint colors from any photo, so we’ve rounded up the top places we turn to find inspiration. Where do you hunt for colors? Top 5 places to find color inspiration:Chip It! chipped local paint store Where do you find your color inspiration? Tell us in the comments! (Images: 1. Sherwin-Williams; 2. Chris; 3. Emily Long; 4.
Prize: (1) $2,000 credit to Zappos Value: Up to $2,000 From: Zappos.com It’s the most wonderful – and anxious – time of the year! Wonderful because presents! Anxious because you have no idea what to get for everyone. And because what are you wearing to the office party? We’ve gone to Zappos and pulled together gift ideas for everyone on your list – including yourself.
Prize: $2,000 to spend on stylish furniture From: American Signature Furniture Value: $2,000 You’ve made it! You’ve decided to live together, merging your two households into one. But figuring out how all your stuff can live together, from your grandmother’s nesting tables to his battered but beloved recliner, well, that can be a tiny bit more challenging.
Keeping your upholstery in tip-top shape should definitely be on your spring cleaning list. With some help from American Signature Furniture, we’ve put together a simple refresher on how to clean different upholstery types, from leather to microfiber. Caring for Upholstery: What to Use When Finer than silk, microfiber strands create a velvety yet durable fabric that’s ideal for upholstery that gets a lot of traffic and sees lots of stains.
Californians and Floridians are blessed with fragrant citrus trees in their backyards that bloom all spring and seem to be in season all year. For the rest of the country, where climates aren’t conducive to growing citrus outdoors through all four seasons, you have to get a little crafty if you want homegrown Key limes for your cervezas. The trick is to grow citrus in a container that you can keep outside from spring to fall, but move inside before the first freeze arrives.
When you have a small garden, it can seem like your plants all compete for premium space come springtime. How do you decide what to plant and what to pass on? Do you grow staples you’ll use all year long in the kitchen, or unusual varieties you can’t find in the market? With intercropping, you can take advantage of the limited space you have — while growing all the vegetables you want — by analyzing the needs of your vegetables and timing your plantings strategically.
Have you ever planted squash in your vegetable garden and wondered why the flowers with what appear to be baby squash on the ends suddenly wilt? The short answer is: They were never pollinated by bees. The long answer is: Squash are monoecious plants (containing both male and female parts) and rely on bees and other pollinators to fertilize their flowers. Female flowers bear the ovaries (essentially immature squash) and need the pollen from male flowers to produce fruit.
Prize: $500 American Express Gift Card Value: $500 From: Miracle-Gro Have you been following Apartment Therapy’s Gardening School? It’s designed to help even the blackest thumbs build up the confidence to get out in the garden…and it’s working! It’s inspiring to see all your amazing pics in the #showusyourseedlings feed. So inspiring that we want to help your dream gardens get growing with a $500 AMEX Gift Card to spend on supplies!
Home lighting is getting exciting. Light bulbs have evolved more in the past five years than in the century-plus since the very first incandescents were introduced. LEDs are revolutionizing home lighting by offering even greater energy efficiency than CFLs combined with the warm glow of traditional incandescents. We’ve partnered with LED pioneer Cree® to bring you up to speed on new LED bulbs and the best ways to use them.
This year’s Room for Color contest, sponsored by Chip It!™by Sherwin-Williams, is notable for the boundless array of different palettes. So much variety! We love seeing readers’ personal styles shine through their use of colors in so many creative ways. And though each entry is unique, some trends are becoming apparent. Here are some trends we’ve spotted—let us know what we missed in the comments!
Maxwell, Apartment Therapy’s founder, needed some occasional tables for his living room, so he took to the internet, checking the Classifieds for good options. He found two stools, versatile enough to be tables or extra seating. But while they were similar, they definitely didn’t match. Want to see how he spent a couple hours on a Saturday using Glidden paint to make them a matched set? Watch our quick video and see the How-To below!
All leathers are not created equal. Learning a few key facts about how it’s made will tell you a lot about the quality of leather upholstery and how it will wear over time. We took a look at the Grayson and Burnham Artisan Leather Collections, both collaborations between American Signature Furniture and Italian designer Modesto Scugliusi, to learn more about what to look for in quality leather upholstery. Top-grain or full-grain: which is the better leather?
As the design nerds we most unabashedly are, we get pretty excited for the big day each October when Benjamin Moore reveals their Color of the Year. This year, we admit, we were momentarily thrown by the reveal – it was not at all what we’d expected. But after a hot second of surprise and debate in the office, we’ve all gotten on board with this trendy non-trend. Do you agree? The Benjamin Moore Color of the Year for 2016 is….. The Color of the Year? Simply White OC-177.
White is sometimes underplayed as the default choice of colorphobes, but some of the boldest and most sophisticated rooms in the world have white walls. Maxwell loves decorating with white walls – as long as it’s the right kind of white. According to Maxwell, the best whites aren’t just a “blank canvas.” He says, “I like the ones with a bit of depth and color.” A good white wall never looks unfinished, “it looks intentional.
We may not always want our houseguests to stay super-long, but we do want them to be comfortable (and think we’re amazing hosts) while they’re here. The best way to ensure your guests are rested and happy? Getting a mattress good enough to accommodate all kinds of sleepers. We teamed up with Value City Furniture and the sleep experts from The Cleveland Clinic to bring you these #flawless tips for choosing the right mattress for your guests.
Have you ever bought a sofa, accent chair or table that looked wonderful in the store (or on Pinterest) but lost its charm once you brought it home? If the color and style were right, the problem may have been that the piece of furniture simply wasn’t the right scale for the room.
With so many weddings designed to reflect a couple’s personal style, why is there still this outdated expectation that a registry needs to include formal china? Many couples today live in small spaces where they can’t host huge parties or store a giant tureen. And people who are marrying later or for the second time are concerned with blending their stuff, not getting more.
With so many couples cohabiting, marrying later and merging their stuff, it’s only natural that modern registries should expand beyond your kitchen cabinets into every room. Who says you have to limit your wedding gifts to tabletop and kitchen tools? Maybe what you really need is a new table, some throw pillows or gallery frames. It’s time to think outside the salad spinner.
Thinking leather might be better? Keep in mind it’s not all created equal. The difference in quality between genuine, bonded, and flat-out fake leather is huge, and there are some easy tricks to spotting the good stuff. We looked at American Signature Furniture’s new line of genuine leather furniture to learn what to look for. OK, duh. But the label is going to say more than just “real” or “fake!
Bethany, a family photographer in Los Angeles, is at the phase of parenting where she’s having to let go. She’s watched her two kids grow and learn, and she’s already nostalgic for their first, early days together. Childhood is marked by memories, and Bethany wanted to savor each one. And as a family photographer, she’s especially in touch with how a family’s home becomes the backdrop for these moments.
It takes a real Apartment Therapy fan to appreciate the Starz hit series Outlander. We’ve been hooked on this series since Claire went shopping for a blue vase at the start of the first season. Now we’re counting down the days for the best eye-candy to come back to Starz on April 9th. Ready to throw your own Outlander-inspired dinner party?
