When Jennifer Comfort enters your home, she’ll chat with you for a few minutes, and then politely ask you to leave her alone, to go back to doing whatever you had been doing before she arrived.
She’ll wander slowly from room to room, getting a feel for each space. If you don’t follow her instructions, if instead you tiptoe up to whatever room she’s in and take a peek, you might find her studying a picture on your wall, or sitting in the center of your floor, pulling color swatches from the box she carries with her.
Comfort is a professional color consultant. She started as an in-house consultant for Belcaro Paint and Decorating Center in Denver and has since gone out on her own.
Over the past several years, she has helped hundreds of people in Denver, its suburbs and outlying mountain areas choose the right colors for both the interiors and exteriors of their homes.
She studied art at the Massachusetts College of Art and University of Colorado at Boulder, but had trouble deciding what kind of artist she wanted to be.
Through trial and error, she explains, she came upon color consulting. She always knew that she loved color, and helping people choose colors for their homes turned out to be a great way for Comfort to “combine artistic endeavors and also pay the bills.”
How does she decide which colors are right for a particular house? Her background in art helps, but Comfort comes to her color decisions largely by reading people’s personalities.
“I try to take my own personality out of it,” she says. “I look at the things people buy – their furniture, the books they read – and that gives me a sense of who they are.”
She might recommend a color scheme that’s fairly subtle, using multiple shades of off-white. Or – for another house, and another family – she might suggest a more daring palette, recommending colors with names like Margarita, Roasted Tomato or Chipotle.
Take, for example, Michael and Carol Sarché’s home in Denver. Though the couple shied away from bold wall colors in the past, Comfort noted the vivid artwork that they had collected during their travels over the years and knew that the Sarchés weren’t afraid of color.
Comfort had brought along – as she does to every consultation – color samples from three lines of paint: Benjamin Moore, Pratt & Lambert, and C2 (a high-end, heavily pigmented paint that offers an array of rich colors and is available, in Colorado, only at Belcaro Paint & Decorating Center).
For the Sarchés’ home, she decided to use C2’s color deck to make her selections, among them aspen green for the guest bedroom, and terra-cotta-accented with a rich, earthy red for the master suite.
Carol Sarché says of she and her husband’s experience with Comfort:
“When we first heard her name, it imparted a sense of ease and security. Then Jennifer arrived and our expectations were well justified. She chose the perfect colors … colors that we loved but never could have imagined on our own. She managed to capture, in her choices, colors that were absolutely right for us and for the personality of our home.”
Comfort also is adept at working with a room’s existing features. “What sometimes trips people up,” she says, “is that they want a room to be something it’s not.”
Take, for example, a bathroom with pink tile. Short of retiling, there’s not much you can do to hide the pink, but rather than fight it with a color that doesn’t match, Comfort will suggest a color that brings together the room by complimenting what can’t be changed.
Before leaving your house, Comfort will write out her color suggestions – along with the numbers of a few reputable painting contractors, if you don’t already have one in mind – and hand this to you with accompanying color swatches.
But because it’s hard to get a sense of how a color will look from a small paper sample, Comfort recommends buying “wet samples” (available at paint stores) and testing your colors before committing to them.
Or you can wing it. Plenty of Comfort’s customers don’t bother with the wet samples. They run with her suggestions.
When choosing colors for your walls
Go for colors that capture the personality of your home and its occupants.
Study your belongings-pictures, linens, objects you’ve collected on family vacations-for color ideas.
Work with a room’s existing features by using colors that complement rather than fight what can’t be changed, such as outdated tile in a bathroom.
Test colors with “wet samples” before committing to them.
