I'm halfway through having my place painted, for the first time in over 20 years. Everything will be topsy-turvy until they are done, by the end of the week, but it is worth camping out to see how my home is emerging with fresh new colors. I'm very happy with the crew I hired, on the recommendation of a friend. Communication has been easy and they have been very scrupulous and careful. It's a huge job, and I'm glad I am able to have a pro crew do all the tedious prep work of patching, sanding, and moving stuff around. The living room has been an orangey/mango/peach yellow ("Villa Peach"),
but I wanted a cleaner and fresher yellow. The new color, Benjamin
Moore's
Dalila, is making me very happy. In this photo, you can see the old color in the alcove. It's amazing how
different colors look in photos, on the computer screen, or at
different times of day!
All the paint we are using is Benjamin Moore. My love affair with
Farrow and Ball paints went aground on the price and also the difficulty of getting samples since no retailer carries it locally. But someone had matched
F & B with Benjamin Moore, so I used these matches to help me narrow things down.
The ceiling and trim throughout will be in
Seashell, described as a soft ivory. To cover the icky acoustic tile ceiling in the living room, they put up sheet-rock. We also are taking out all the old crown moldings, most of which had been installed in a shoddy manner. The result is a much cleaner look.
The wall you see when you open the front door, in the tiny entry space, will be done in a "suede" finish, from the
Ralph Lauren line, in the Santa Rosa pink. It goes well with the living room color that gets lots of natural light and transitions well with the color I've chosen for the shadowy hallway.
The two hallways get almost no natural light but their walls are what you see in front of your face when you are exiting the bedroom and bathroom, so I want them to be good backgrounds for displaying art under artificial light. They had been a dingy light gray, but now they will be painted Ben Moore
Gray Mountain, (a color matched to Farrow and Ball's Brassica, one of my inspiration colors, and described as "a grayed-down purple"). It looks almost bronzey-brown in some lights. I was going to get all fancy with color for the hallway ceilings, but Miss R is of the opinion that Seashell is best, and I agree. Too many colors will be too busy. In this photo here you can see how many patches we tried out; the trim looks yellow, but that is just an effect of the light.
The dining room has off-white wainscoting up to about six feet, also to be painted in Seashell. The ceiling was hand-painted by the previous owners with colors reminiscent of a twilight sky, and with some clouds and stars overhead; we are keeping the clouds, but matching the blue, and painting down to the top of the wainscoting to cover a row of motifs hat did not quite work at suggesting the top of a fence.
The bathroom is still green, but not the mistaken mint green of the last paint job (that irritated the hell out of me, but I did not object and have it repainted). The color is called
Lilly Pad, and the double l in Lilly is a tip of the hat to Lilly Pulitzer, whose happy color palette included many soft, fresh greens. This one is neither too yellow nor too blue,
Here is a test patch on one of the kitchen walls.
My bedroom will go dramatic with an deep indigo blue named
Indigo-go, or "the party paint" as we are calling it. I almost went with Kensington Blue, but I like the more purpley tinge. Because it is a small room that also gets almost no natural light, lighting will be important. I already have objects and bedding in hot pink or fuschia that provide a pop of color, and some new
sheets and
bedding from Ikea in a palette of
red-violet purples and blues.
Mr. Leo is helping me test the colors.
The kitchen has some pesky matching issues with the existing laminate
countertop color, which has a reddish tinge, and linoleum
floor colors colors, which are a mix of greens. Maybe some day I'll replace each, but I've decided not to this time around. Lilly Pad is going to be used on the walls that meet the floor and the backsplash area and wall the meets the counter will be something else, still to be determined. Maybe the Seashell? I want to get tile for the backsplash.
Lilly Pad and Mountain Gray go well together in the transitions from room to room as one looks down the long hallway in either direction. The back kitchen wall in Lilly Pad green gets lots of natural light and when you look down the long shadowy hallway, the patch you see seems to glow.
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