Month: March 2007

So you’ve decided to repaint a room or two—fantastic. Chosen a color yet? No? You’re sure to wind up in a position that’s both thrilling and terrifying: standing in front of the wall of color chips at the paint or hardware store. Knowing this position bewilders many would-be Picassos, I enlisted an expert to walk me through the process. Caroline Andersson-Henri is a local interior designer and owner of Upstairs-Downstairs Interiors; she met me at the sample wall of Paint Plus in Woodbrook Shopping Center. Here’s her wisdom on tackling the color-chip task.

Caroline Andersson-Henri showed ABODE how to tap the resources of the paint chip panoply. One big secret: Put that chip on a wall!

1. Think ahead. Even before going to the store, Andersson-Henri said, it’s important to envision the finished room. “You have to look at the end result, then back up toward the baseline,” she said. “You need to know what you want to do with that room, how it’s going to feel.” Look at books and magazines, she said; find examples of rooms you like.

2. At the store, scan the chips for tones that attract you. Say I want light green, I asked; how do I choose just one from the dozens of light greens? “These are lemony and citrusy,” said Andersson-Henri, gesturing toward one area of the sample wall, “these are more blue, these are gray-greens.” My eye kept landing on the yellower tones, so Andersson-Henri pulled out three cards, each with seven different colors.

3. Choose the hue. Each card runs from dark, intense colors at the bottom to near-whites at the top. My guide warned that any color will seem stronger when it covers a larger area. “When in doubt, take the muted tone,” she says. “I’d go with the second least intense.” Now, instead of comparing 21 tones, we were sizing up just three—the second row on each card.

4. Put it on the wall. Andersson-Henri folded back the cards to hide the hues we’d already ruled out, then held them up to a wall. “The color is going on the wall,” she said, “so that’s where you should look at it; don’t stand over it and look.” Standing back about 10 paces, I again scanned my options and realized I had a favorite: Honeydew Melon! Yum.

5. Compare to other paints. For my theoretical light-green room, I wanted another color for areas like chair rails or window trim. We picked three possible accent colors, all off-white: one muted and nearly yellow, one crisp and cool, and one cheerful and buttery. Andersson-Henri held them to the wall around the Honeydew Melon chip and pointed out how it seemed to change depending on what was next to it. I liked what happened when Honeydew Melon met the buttery accent color, Wicker Mat; Andersson-Henri called this a “playful, cottagey look.” Perfect.

6. Compare to other objects. What if I needed to match other elements in a room? A sample brought to the store would help: a scrap of wallpaper, an arm sleeve from a sofa. Andersson-Henri opened a wallpaper book to a stucco-look paper with a stencilled vine pattern in green and red. We tried to find a matching green on the sample wall, but none seemed just right. “There’s nothing wrong with doing a custom color,” she suggested (though it is, of course, more expensive). One caveat: Save the formula. “If years later you want to go back [to touch up] and you can’t find the formula, you’re in trouble,” she said.

7. Take it home. “You should never pick color from a little chip,” says Andersson-Henri. Here’s another of her axioms: “Don’t trust any light but the light that is in your space.” I’d already seen how chips seemed to transform as we carried them around the store, near windows, under sample-wall spot lighting. Were I really preparing to paint a room, now would be the time to purchase a small amount of Honeydew Melon and put it onto a posterboard, then tape to the wall. Only then, said Andersson-Henri, “you’ll know whether you can live with it.”

8. Choose your finish. “The more glossy the paint, the more it’ll stand out,” Andersson-Henri explained. Glossy finishes will emphasize any imperfections in the wall. How smooth are the walls in my soon-to-be Honeydew Melon room? And how much tolerance do I have for looking at nicks? “If you want it to look slick and perfect,” said Andersson-Henri, glossy paint on older walls would not be the way to go. Since I myself am neither slick nor perfect, I figure my walls needn’t be. A medium-gloss finish should do just fine.

“Perfect,” you’re liable to think as you pull into the yellow-gravel driveway of the little cottage in Free Union. It couldn’t be more quintessentially Albemarle: Set back from a winding country road in a yard with lovely trees and understated landscaping, it has a cute-as-a-button gabled profile, a sheltered porch in front and an open deck in back, overlooking a tidy pond and a sweeping Blue Ridge view. The approach is so charming that a visitor’s expectations for the interior could easily be dashed by clutter or bad choices. Fortunately, the news is good.

ABODE recently dropped by this horse-country gem for a tour from Andrew Hersey, who just finished painting most of the walls, ceilings and trim in the house for a new owner. (You might recognize Andrew’s name as a frequent photographic contributor to these pages.) The cottage has a somewhat open feel downstairs, with kitchen flowing into living room and a wall of French doors opening onto the deck; throughout this space, as well as the more discrete upstairs rooms, wall colors ranging from blues to browns feel lively but not overwhelming. How, we wondered, did he and his client put together the enviable palette for this place? Room by room, we got the answers.

Local painter Andrew Hersey throws down: "Do you want a color that will challenge you a little?"

Surprising pair: the guest room

We started in a small guest room off the kitchen. Though the red-stained hardwood floors and wooden furniture are both warm in tone, the walls are a light, cool blue. This is in part because of the room’s function, Hersey says: “You want something restful, calm and relaxing in the bedroom” as opposed to something more “warm and lively” as in living areas. It’s also a matter of personality. “I have one client that painted her bedroom fire-engine red,” he says. “It looks really cool,” he says, and though the client loves her blazing boudoir, “It’s not particularly restful.” This room, though, feels like a lazy afternoon at the beach.

One more point: With blue walls, red floors and red accents on the mostly white bedding, one might expect a cutesy Americana vibe to creep in. Somehow, it doesn’t. “I encourage people to choose colors that are subtle but still have a richness and personality,” Hersey says. Lesson: Try something unexpected, and know that colors don’t always behave according to convention.

Healthy contrasts: the living areas

First rule of thumb in choosing color, says Hersey: “You need to look at what’s not going to change” and tailor your paint choices accordingly. In the living room, what wasn’t changing was furniture (two large red pieces, a sofa and a painted wooden bench, plus a pair of buff upholstered chairs) and a black woodstove. An obvious choice might have been a warm tone, perhaps a light orange. But rather than trying to “match” colors, Hersey says, he likes to find “colors that are opposites; colors that make a statement against each other.” Hence this pale, but not pastel, green. With the red of the couch and other accents throughout the room, the green works surprisingly well—and it suddenly makes perfect sense when you look at the rug in the middle of the room and see the same red and light green residing together happily. (Christmas, by the way, is not evoked here: The green is too fresh, with blue undertones, for that.) A gold picture frame, two softly colored landscape paintings flanking the windows, and a pair of blue-green glass vases on the windowsill pull it all together in a somehow unified eclecticism.

The living room in this Free Union house, previously a very pale shade that almost looked white, now has a lot more personality thanks to the interplay of green walls, red furnishings and the yellow of the adjoining kitchen.

Speaking of which, there’s a pleasing variety to the compact, connected rooms downstairs—green living room, yellow kitchen and a dining room whose walls are a dark taupe. That last hard-to-classify color was another of the givens Hersey considered when he chose the green and yellow; it came with the house and wasn’t going to change, since his client liked its somewhat formal look, ready for a dinner party. “When and where do you see multiple colors in different rooms?” is a good question to consider, he says. In this case, when you step inside the back door and look to the left, your gaze lands on the darker dining room flanked by brighter, more casual colors in kitchen and living room. The multi-room puzzle has been beautifully solved.

“I’m really into seeing different colors within the same room,” says Hersey, which is why he extended the yellow of the kitchen past the French doors and into an area visible from the living room couch. It gives the space a layered effect, with the cheerful yellow of the kitchen leading the eye out toward the back deck and its killer views. And why this yellow, with its red undertones? The client wanted “something cheery,” says Hersey, “pleasant to be in while still being subtle. The wood [of the cabinetry] is so warm that the softness of the yellow works nicely.”

Sweet simplicity: the upstairs rooms

Climbing the stairway to the second floor, Hersey explained that one reason the house feels so pleasantly unified—despite each room’s having its own color—is that he gave all the ceilings a fresh coat of white and put glossy white on all the wooden trim and railings. Result: Ceilings feel higher (a plus in these snug rooms) and the whole place gets a clean, unpretentious look that feels right for its old-fashioned cottage architecture.

Nowhere is that truer than in the bathroom. “This had a plaid wallpaper,” says Hersey, “which was really atrocious.” His client asked for a light, airy room instead and got this baby-blue shade, which along with fresh white embroidered curtains lets the focal point be the standout: a warmly colored antique wood dresser converted into a sink cabinet.

A bedroom gets a green, closer to blue than yellow, which could take on a pastel character depending on other elements like bedding.

This blue also “contrasts with the green and orange,” Hersey explains—that is, the green from the living room that continues up the stairwell, and the sherbet-like color of the reading nook at the top of the stairs, which Hersey describes as “rich but not dark.” Once again, two colors animate a single room: sitting in one of the upholstered chairs in the nook, you could look up and see the friendly interplay of orange and green, rather than only one color. The space had previously been “a sandy yellow color that wasn’t awful,” says Hersey, but “wasn’t warm” either. This hue finds a sweet spot between furniture, floor, and stairwell. Lesson, in Hersey’s words: “Color should add some richness.”

“We all have colors we’re used to seeing in houses,” says Hersey. “Do you want a color that will challenge you a little?”