This Is the Small-Space-Friendly Paint Trend You Need to Try for Your Next Project (It’s So Unique!)

While it might seem impossible to reinvent the (color) wheel when it comes to paint, recent trends have proved otherwise. There’s always the ever-popular accent wall, for one, or whimsical trompe-l’œil-inspired designs that give the effect of painted-on wall moldings. Even pairing certain hues or palettes can be totally transformative, and there’s one new color-combo-meets-styling-trick that needs to be on your radar.

Last August, California-based design editor and Apartment Therapy contributor Angela Tafoya opened a secondhand children’s clothing shop in San Francisco, NOOMOON, with her husband, artist Eric Bailey. Limited to just 350 square feet, the founders tapped interior stylist and art director Rosy Fridman to help with the overall store design. Their goal? Making the small space feel fun, colorful, and ultimately kid-approved, which Fridman envisioned with a continuous floor-to-ceiling grid design. 

From there, Tafoya and Bailey painted the space themselves using Backdrop’s Gin Blossoms and Miami Parasol for the lilac and butter yellow pairing. The playful grid motif dominates the majority of the store — doors, moldings, walls — and even extends beyond the walls onto the floor and travels up the store’s countertop. It stops just shy of the clothing racks on the right side of the space, though, which the couple enveloped in that same lilac shade for a more minimalist, color-blocked backdrop that allows their unique inventory to shine. 

“Executing the space was fun and really tapped into activities I did as a kid — painting linear shapes, playing with bright colors, cutting large lettering with scissors,” Bailey added in a press release.

Not only does the grid design perfectly personalize this compact brick and mortar, but it’s also fodder for new paint palette inspiration. Of course, yellow and purple will always go together as complementary colors. Here, though, the lighter iterations — butter yellow and lilac — read much more approachable (because, let’s be honest, a true deep purple can be incredibly intimidating to style).   

Butter yellow specifically has already dominated home design this year for its soft-yet-cheery aesthetic, which can arguably be positioned as a neutral color. That makes it versatile enough to pair with bolder hues — like red or cobalt blue — but lilac works particularly well for its similarly muted saturation. 

You may not have the flexibility to fully re-create this grid style in your own space, especially in a rental, so consider starting small by painting a single bedroom wall or door frame in your choice of two colors. Painter’s tape would also work well for mapping out the grid lines, but you can experiment with various widths, too. Either way, as the NOOMOON showroom proves, this paint trick was made for elevating small spaces!