See How I Upgraded My Bathroom with This Controversial Paint Color (and Sold My Home in 3 Days!)

Hot take: Brown is not high on the list of paint shades people would typically choose for their bathroom, but I feel like it should be. Earlier this year I was itching to complete a mini makeover on our powder bath. I loved the space as-is, but I wanted to find a hue for the walls that complemented the vintage landscape paintings I had collected to hang — and everything I sampled felt flat. 

I tried a dusty blue, but it blended too closely with many of the paintings instead of making them pop; the same went for a mushroom-y taupe, which didn’t read as dramatic as I would have liked. Finally, I went to my local hardware store with one of my antique paintings in tow to collect a menagerie of paint chip samples to debate over. 

As it turns out, I only needed to grab one. The moment I saw Chinchilla by Sherwin-Williams, I knew it was exactly the hue I had been looking for. Moody and dramatic, Chinchilla is what I like to describe as a modern take on brown — it’s infused with a bit of purple, so it reads differently depending on the time of day and the type of light the room receives. It feels almost velvety, which I felt was the perfect foil for all the gilded frames I planned on including in the space. Truthfully, I didn’t even buy a sample can to try it before buying (typically a big no-no, I realize); I just dove right into the dark side, and I’m so glad I did. This color is definitely as “moody” as I’ve ever gone in my home, but the payoff was big — it made our petite powder room feel like it had the prominence and personality it was missing before. 

Ironically, shortly after falling in love with this color and coating the walls, we decided to put our house on the market after finding our dream home out of state. During our walk-through with our real estate agent before listing, she mentioned the possibility of repainting the bathroom a less polarizing hue, to which I emphatically disagreed. I wanted to keep it — not only because I just went through the trouble of painting it but also because I felt like it gave buyers a peek into what I considered to be the personality of our 200-year-old home.

We were lucky enough to sell in a single weekend, and as we reviewed all the offers, a common thread began to emerge in the feedback. All the potential buyers loved our paint colors, including the should-be-controversial brown paint I picked for the bathroom. The color did exactly what I had hoped it would — it created a comfortable and cool environment while encouraging future owners to embrace all the quirks of our old farmhouse the way we did over the years. As for me, I’ve learned that being a bit more adventurous with color can pay off in ways big and small. It’s just paint, after all — what’s the harm in experimenting?