09/13/2024
This article is just a day in the life of a color consultant. I just finished a week of virtual consulting on an expansive 1920's home in New Jersey. I helped this client at her home in Willow Glen and she reached out again when they moved. The struggle is real!
One House, One Homeowner and More Than 100 Shades of White
By Jessica Seigel
Sept. 13, 2024
As a newbie on my first renovation, I had no idea what I was getting into when the contractor asked for wall color. “White,” I said. “Which one?” he asked.
In the world of paint, there are hundreds of shades of white that differ from one maker to the next, from Benjamin Moore’s Chantilly Lace and Bavarian Cream to Behr’s Swirling Water and Wind’s Breath. How do you make sense of such frothy monikers, and how do you choose?
When I looked blankly (not a color) at the contractor, he suggested Benjamin Moore Decorator’s White for this dark, north-facing living space with Federal-style moldings.
Hue-bris perhaps, but I was skeptical that actual decorators ever choose that shade, doubting that the nuclear tint would contrast nicely with the Super White for trim, which I knew is classic. I wanted the stylish grayish “pop” I’d seen in décor literature and real estate advertisements. I could do better, I thought.
At the hardware store, the paint specialist was on vacation. How hard could it be? I riffled the sample cards of Benjamin Moore’s 152-shade Off White Collection, which accounts for a slight majority of the company’s 50 best-selling colors. Too many options? “Yes, I could see that offering 152 whites sounds excessive,” allows Andrea Magno, the company’s director of color marketing and design. (Home Depot carries 160 different shades of white interior paint.) But, she explains, it’s not overkill when you’re hunting for that specific, special something.
Under the harsh hardware-store lighting, I couldn’t tell anything from the 2-by-2-inch squares on paper strips. I grabbed a bunch, bought some sample cans and headed back to my Manhattan home. What followed, through three projects over six years, is a surprisingly common story: color-induced neurosis afflicting home renovators who think of themselves as otherwise rational beings. Pressure to find the right look for a rental or sale only exacerbates the anxiety.
“White is the thing that most drives people up the wall,” says Panchita Maldonado, a color and design specialist who runs the consulting firm Panchita Artista. Faced with so many subtle options, she says, “there is a point when people think they are going crazy.”
To begin with, white is not what it seems, as Isaac Newton proved with his 1660s prism experiments refracting sunlight into its component parts — the rainbow spectrum. And our eyes deceive, retaining afterimages, such as a bluish-green shadow from staring at red, clearly visible against a white background, as you’ll see in the art educator Josef Albers’s exercises from his landmark 1963 book, “Interaction of Color.”
Though real estate is about location, color is about “context, context, context,” explains Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the trend-influencing Pantone Color Institute. This “context” includes natural and artificial lighting, space dimensions, room usage, home style, furnishings and hanging art.
Then add in psychology. “Any color that you put on the wall is going to cause some kind of emotional reaction,” Ms. Eiseman said. So “pristine” whites with blue undertones feel “cold,” like ice. “Happy” varieties, tinged yellow and red, are “warm” or “sunny.”
And there’s memory — longing for the gleaming whites of a Greek isles vacation, nostalgia for yellowy undertones of 1970s and 1980s home walls, repulsion for the pistachio of 1960s schoolrooms. “It’s deposited in your psyche,” Ms. Eiseman said. “You may not even remember, but when you start to investigate, it’s just like therapy.”
No, thank you. Then I lived it, yearning and remembrance hindering my way. First, my striving for fashionable gray (classified as off-white) tripped me up in that northern living space. Cascade Mountains, Gray Lake and others looked crisp in the morning, dreary with afternoon shadows and morbid by nightfall.
In the end, the contractor was right. I surrendered to the top-selling Decorator’s White, which contrasted subtly with the Super White trim, feeling airy and expansive all day. The duller matte wall texture, selected for easy touch-ups, offset the shinier semi-gloss moldings.
Next, tackling a southern front room last year, I imagined the direct sunlight would warm those grays. Instead, they looked worse, like asphalt at a wedding. It’s just as well, since beige-amplified “greige” has been declared the next big thing.
I was done trend-chasing. Actually, I liked the existing lavender-leaning Oyster from BenMo, chosen by the previous residents years before my watch. My new contractors, a pair of brothers, deemed it “too girlie.” Though I’m a girl, I wanted neutral. They liked White Dove, a BenMo top seller, but it looked too yellow to me, like urine light.
Stumped, I decided to branch out, inspired by Consumer Reports reviews that Behr sold at Home Depot is better quality and cheaper. At the big store, the chaos and unfamiliar color names scrambled my brain. Still I grabbed New House White because it sounded, well, new. On the wall? Too pink.
Anxiety rising, I compounded the D.I.Y. don’t — too many samples. I headed out to buy more. Hopping on my bicycle, one leg slung over the bar, I complimented a jaunty passerby on her bodacious matching hoop earrings, orange Nike Air Force 1 sneakers and flame-decorated red pants. “Thank you,” she said. “I love color. I’m a specialist.”
Of paint? Really?
Only in New York. Here was the fabulous Ms. Maldonado, walking past my front door between estimating jobs for Precision Painting Plus contractors. Would she come upstairs to tie-break? “Sure,” she agreed, as if being hailed off the street for a color emergency was perfectly normal. She’d seen it all — heavy sweating, headaches, and couples screaming in public while finalizing choices, like in her prior showroom and trade rep job for the luxe paint purveyor Farrow & Ball.
Upstairs, Ms. Maldonado perused our patchwork of 11 wall swatches. Too many, she knew, but remained diplomatic. Three to five is better. Oyster made her frown. Her pick: White Dove. Once completed, the room looked warmly creamy, not suspiciously yellow, as she’d promised.
In vain, I’d hoped these experiences would lead to more decisiveness as I next tackled a deeply yellowed 14-foot-high entryway. My artist mother, Judy Seigel, had painted it a cool-toned semi-gloss 45 years earlier, with only wipe-downs since. I remember her crouching, when I was a child, before an open gallon of white, stirring in bluish gray from the moldings paint can. The added blue pigment, she explained, would counteract yellowing, since those tints are from the opposite family of colors. She was right, and the wall outlasted her, though it finally burnished to a ripe shade of p*e.
I had long eschewed her art world to become a word person. Her big shoes (clogs, actually) were hard to fill, and now here I was, finding my own path through multitudinous shades with the help of unexpected experts.
So, following her footsteps, I chased marine undertones, but all felt factory cold. And now, White Dove from the earlier project blared too brightly beside the beige-inflected hall stair walls, repainted over the years with custom-matched colors. This time, I sought help sooner, turning to Caroline Racond, who advises all comers at Janovic Paint & Decorating in Soho.
Seated at her storefront desk, the lively 50-year design veteran scrutinized my cellphone hallway photos, diagnosing my paint sampling as too small, too many, haphazard and needing two coats to cover the yellow beneath. Then Ms. Racond gave me 8-by-8-inch color sheets and recommended real-paint-on-paper versions ($5.95 online) from the company Samplize. First stick them up, she directed, and then stand farther back. “You know what I mean?” she asked. Nearsighted, I did.
The stick-and-p*els helped eliminate awful options, but we still painted finalists directly on the wall — with better brush technique. After many days’ deliberations, too lemony Sand Dollar lost to Pink Damask, with its sunny blush. A year later, every time I pass by, the wall still makes me feel inordinately happy.
One House, One Homeowner and More Than 100 Shades of White
The neutral can be very colorful, a homeowner learned the hard way. Take our quiz to see if you can tell the difference between shades.
