Picking and Choosing

Has this ever happened to you? You're ready to redecorate, you've saved your favorite photos from shelter magazines and blogs, and you have a general color scheme in mind. You head to the hardware store to pick up some paint samples. You get to the store and begin studying row upon row of color chips, looking for that perfect color. You find one you like, then another you like that's totally different, and when you hold them up together, neither one looks so great. You start squinting, realizing that the fluorescent lights aren't doing your eyes (or the colors) any favors, and think to yourself that maybe you just need to find the perfect trim color and that will make the wall color decision easy. So you start looking at all the whites and off-whites and creams and beiges . . . your head starts to spin. How many versions of white can there possibly be? It has been fifteen minutes and you're about at your wit's end. You take all the samples you have pulled and leave the store bewildered--and no closer to choosing a paint color.

A lot of us have been there, myself included. It's overwhelming and can be counterproductive, putting you off the whole redesign project because the universe of choices is just too great.

 Source: Benjamin Moore

To avoid all this agony, I have vowed to never again enter a paint store without either: 

1.) the specific names of paint colors that I want samples of or

2.) a physical object (fabric, book cover, scrap of paper) whose color I like and want to match.

Trying to match the color of an object can be time consuming, but it's a lot easier than trying to imagine what a 1-inch square patch of color will look like all over the walls of a room that's completely different from the one you're in. As for pre-selecting colors, my two favorite secret weapons are House Beautiful's monthly Color feature (a round-up of designers' picks, many of which are archived here) and this excellent book:

Source: Book Depository

Choosing Colors by Kevin McCloud is a beautiful and thoughtfully researched collection of color palettes. It includes detailed notes on the origins of the colors and how they interact with each other. For some colors, the author even comments on the whether the hue tends to hold up well under different light conditions or whether that beautiful green-gray is likely to become a sickly yellow in the wrong light. Best of all, every single one of the colors is indexed to an actual paint color so you can go out and find it in the store. This is how I chose the blue for our bathroom, which we love just as much in person as we did on the page.

Once you have a few colors picked out, it's time to hit the paint store--armed with a plan, for a change. First, find what you're looking for. Then it's okay to branch out a little: check out the colors that are nearby in the display to see if a shade lighter or darker might suit your fancy. You can even do a run-through of all the colors that are similar (light blues, or deep burgundys) to see if there is anything you like more than your original choice. But that choice keeps you anchored; it narrows the scope of your task to something a mere mortal can reasonably achieve. In the end, hopefully you'll come home with four or five good options--and you won't be stuck helplessly staring into a sea of a thousand tiny color chips.