My friend is looking over a rental house she wants to freshen up. “I’ll just paint the walls white,” she says.
I learned long ago that ‘just’ and ‘white’ don’t belong in the same sentence. “Which white?” I ask.
“What do you mean which white?”
“Do you want a bluish white, grayish or tannish? Or do you want white with a hint of peach, taupe, sage or cerulean?”
“Just basic white,” she says. “How hard is that?”
How hard is that? I want to tell her it’s uber hard – harder than finding the total area of the universe, the perfect black dress and legal tax-evasion strategies. Finding the perfect white is harder than marriage, which, like white, looks easy to the uninitiated but in fact is a complicated amalgam.
Last time I wanted to refresh a room with a coat of white paint, I wound up with a 5-inch stack of paint chips, a nervous tic and a bald spot. The choice involved six trips to the paint store, eight quarts of test paint, one quart of vodka, four false starts, a jar of antacid, and three calls to the suicide hotline.
“Why are you making this so hard?” I remember Dan, my husband, asking. “It’s just white.”
“What do you mean just white? It’s our neutral! The background for everything! This is how God felt when choosing the sky and the earth.”
“Could you be overthinking this?”
“Thank you Mr. Black & White, but everything hinges on the subtle hue in this undertone, my future carpet, sofa, dishes, wardrobe, lipstick, car, even my mood.”
He left me to my head banging, hair pulling and mewling.
“Working with whites is tricky,” agrees color maven Leatrice Eiseman, author of More Alive With Color, (Capital Books, 2006), and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. If it were so simple, why would Ralph Lauren Home offer 60 interior shades in its “Perfect Whites” collection?
Eiseman notes that well-done homes usually have a great neutral wall color, often a shade of white, ivory, taupe, beige, grey or khaki. The right background color doesn’t shout but gives a home a sure hand and pulls it together. The wrong color makes everything in the place argue.
Marni Jameson is a nationally syndicated columnist living in the Denver area. Contact her through marnijameson.com.
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Personal coloring plays role in your choice of white
I asked Leatrice Eiseman from the Pantone Color Institute to share the most common white color crimes, and her advice for picking the best neutrals for your home.
Pick a color you look good in. Depending on your personal coloring, Eiseman says, you will feel more at home in a shade of white you wear well. People with platinum hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, or conversely blue-black hair and very dark eyes look best in a pure white. Those who have warm brown or reddish hair, warmer skin tones and brown or amber eyes look great in creamy-warm white. People who aren’t clearly one or the other do well in off white – a white that’s not creamy but contains a dollop of some other color. Don’t pick a white with undertones that don’t suit you, then build on it.
Go with what you have. If you have a sofa or carpet you plan to keep, pick paint with an undertone that goes with them. Changing paint is cheaper than replacing the carpet or sofa.
When determining an undertone, hold the color next to pure white. The undertone – often taupe, ivory, peach, gray or sand – will jump out. In real estate, the mantra is location, location, location; in selecting a color, the key is context, context, context. “The color isn’t as important as what it’s next to,” Eiseman says. When in doubt, choose a “dirty” white, or “a white with a teeny bit of muddiness.”
Don’t put two whites next to each other that don’t have the same undertone. Dark and light shades that have the same undertone work well together, but if the carpet has a mushroom undertone, and the walls are stark bluish white, both will suffer. If you’re stuck with two mismatched whites, you can make them work. For instance, if your kitchen has all white appliances, and cream tile. Pull the two fields together by getting a window treatment or wallpaper that has both cream and white in the mix. Then add an accent color like Chinese red or ocean blue.
Balance warm and cool colors. Every room should have one dominant color scheme that’s either warm or cool. Then, deliberately pull in color from the other side. For instance, in a room that has deep gold and burgundy furnishings, pale gold walls look nice, and green plants will add balance. Similarly, if you have pale blue walls and a light blue sofa, add peach pillows.
Don’t chop up a small house with different wall colors. If you can see into several rooms from one vantage point, paint all the walls the same neutral. It will make the home flow and feel larger. However, painting a room that you can’t see into a different color can add a nice element of surprise.
If you think this is harder than quantum physics, you’re right.
