Press, Studio Updates, and Color Selection

My now infamous IKEA-alternative platform bed, designed by best-boyfriend-ever David Burnett, was featured again on Apartment Therapy, this time as part of a round-up of platform beds. (Thanks Annie for the catch.) Even more exciting, a photographer for ReadyMade Magazine arrives next week to shoot pictures for their regular feature “I Made This” in an upcoming issue. More details as I learn them.

Our work on the studio has slowed down a bit - seems like there’s just so much going on in the summer months - but we finally completed the bathroom last weekend. I was a little skeptical of my color choice, an extremely dark turquoise, but with the second coat completed it looks fabulous. Even though my bathroom is impossibly tiny, dark turquoise walls + expanse of white tile + cherry stained trim + linen bamboo embroidered shower curtain = tropical spa. I’m very pleased and suddenly want to hang out in this tiny room stocked with towels, books, candles and flowers. We’re still working out how to take some effective photos in what is essentially a closet…

The experience with the bathroom paint color got me thinking. When I painted my front door a retro not-quite-sage green, my landlord was ecstatic, exclaiming “That door looks retro as @#%*!” He went on to explain that when he purchased my chosen color at the hardware store, he thought it was pretty ugly, but seeing it on the door was perfect. When he saw the bathroom color, he said basically the same thing. So I started thinking about the colors we choose for our homes, a decision that a lot of people, including I, struggle with. I realized that I don’t select the colors that I think look pretty on the chip anymore.

My last few paint selections have involving grabbing a number of samples from the hardware store in the general color I’m thinking - blue, green, whatever - and then comparing them to the color of an existing object that I enjoy looking at until I find the match, which is usually not at all the chip I imagined it to be. The chip looks weird, even ugly, and not really like the source object. When the color is on the wall, it still doesn’t look exactly the same, but it usually looks great. Some examples are the front door, the living room, and the bathroom. When I painted the front door, I found the ugly so-named Athenian green by searching through chips until I found the closest match to the existing tile inlay at the building’s entry. The tile is comprised of bits of several colors, so finding and exact match was impossible. Even so, I picked the closest thing, and the painted door blends perfectly, also working well with the green terracotta on the building. In the living room, I had trouble finding the perfect blueish-greenish-gray, so I ended up matching the color to a set of rice bowls I bought in San Francisco years ago. The resulting color turned out differently than I expected, but I love it just as much as I’ve always loved those bowls. And the weird bathroom color? Inspired by some old dining chairs purchased because of the stunningly unusual color of their vinyl seat colors.

Conclusions: Colors that look pretty on a 2” square piece of coated paper don’t necessarily look that great on the wall. Colors matched from other objects don’t look the same on the wall, because the object is probably not made of dry wall, not one solid color, and may not be flat, but they still have the same feel. Our brain is not very effective at observing a color, remembering it accurately, and finding it again later. Or at least my brain isn’t, because it tries to remember ideas about the color - it was a yellow-green, sort of soft, etc etc, which isn’t very accurate. The chip I think is the right color at the store usually isn’t the one at all. If you match your walls to an object you love, you’ll probably love your walls, for better or worse.