Thinking Of Painting? Think Pale Colors

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There is a major trend going on when it comes to choosing paint colors. More and more people are avoiding the bright and loud colors, and going with a dull, simple and clean look for paint. Sara Ruffin Costello of The Wall Street Journal discusses more in her article The Case Against Color:

Pulling the decorating trigger would be much easier if I removed seven of the nine major color options. Left with just black and white, raging indecisiveness would give way to calculated precision. The tough calls could be solved with a coin.

Pale rooms, sucked free of distracting reds, blues and yellows, are having a moment. A few months ago at a trends seminar at the Decoration & Design Building in New York, super-decorator Miles Redd showed slides of crème colored rooms. Gasp. Even the king of saturated hues was hankering for something more soothing.

"Occasionally I get a client who doesn't want color," Mr. Redd explained to me. "Most recently I worked for a woman with very edited taste, and her directive was to keep it calm. We conjured up rooms in the palest blonde and ice—what became interesting was how shape, texture and paint finish were the strong cards." Becoming more enthusiastic about the subject, Mr. Redd went on to describe, in hilarious detail, his imaginary "total black and white apartment" featuring, "an under-furnished ballroom with chalky plaster walls, an ivory terrazzo floor with a small black star in the center, three pairs of leaded French doors and four Jean-Michel Frank club chairs on a lambskin rug.

"Call it a trend. Celerie Kemble—the neotraditional decorator to the jet set known for Palm Beach brights—has just come out with a book called "Black & White (and a bit in between)" (Clarkson N. Potter). In it, she catalogues some of the finest no-color work she and her peers have done, listing a million reasons why going color-free is painless, stylish and timeless, even dragging in literary masters to elevate the sell. "Shakespeare constrained himself to a limited meter, and in it, wrote the world's greatest plays," she argues. "By narrowing the mission, you can concentrate your energies, focus your embellishments, and multiply your opportunities."

Read more at The Wall Street Journal