via my website - www.CristinaAcosta.com

Hello! I really appreciate the articles you've written on choosing color. Well, I am stuck with a hardwood floor that I seem to be fighting with. I need a fabulous neutral. Do you have any advice on how to find the right color to complement my hardwood? Thank you for helping answer my question. Attached are photos of the floor, I hope they are Okay. Thanks -- Jennifer

Dear Jennifer,

The first way to decide what to do when you're "fighting" with a color is to identify how the color is functioning in your master palette. Each color in your palette has 2 identities. The first identity is the color's name -- for example: red, blue, brown, etc. The second identity each color has is it's relationship to surrounding colors.

Here's an example of how relationship changes your perception of a color.

• On the Pacific Northwest Coast, the color green is everywhere. Drive through the natural landscape and you'll notice that there is so much of the color green, that you eventually become numb to it and don't really notice it anymore. Green is now functioning as a neutral. A red barn visually pops out at you. In this situation red is an accent color
  
• In the canyons of the American Southwest, colors of red rock are everywhere. Drive through red rock canyons and you eventually become numb to the color red. Red is now functioning as a neutral. A green tree visually pops out at you. In this situation green is an accent color.
  

As you know, red and green are rarely referred to as neutrals in home decor. Yet, in a design context similar to what I've described in the natural world, they could be.

• The most common understanding of a neutral is as a color without much of a name identity. Colors with names like beige, taupe, stone, etc. are the grayish and brownish tones often referred to as neutrals.

What this means to you is that for a color to be neutral with your existing foundation color palette, it would have to have orange/red tones in it that refer to the color of your floor. (This can be a subtle reference.) When a color refers to another color, both look intentional. If you have a color you don't like and you ignore it, the overall effect of your interior design will be weakened.

That said, you also have another component to the colors of your foundation color palette. The floor color of dark orange/red is contrasting with the white wainscot and trim both in value; the floor is dark (on a scale of 1 to 10 it's a 8), versus the white (1 on the value scale) And in color temperature. The floor color is "warm" versus the "cool" white (relatively) of the trim.

Dark wood (a 10 on the value scale) furniture in the background works well with the value of the wood floor.

Keeping your trim and wainscot white looks nice and reinforces the traditional lines of the home.

With that in mind, your color scheme is one of extreme values: white and dark, without other values in between. Though sticking with that approach can be traditional to the architecture of your home, bringing in some mid-value tones as either neutrals or identifiable colors will create more emotional warmth.

• In rooms where you want to keep the color light, I would choose warm light neutrals such as brownish orangey/red tans and golds that refer to your floor color.
• In rooms with white wainscot, I suggest choosing darker warm colors (at least a 5 to 8 on the value scale) as they "stand up" well to the floor color.
  
• Because you have such sharply defined rooms (the white wainscott, doors, trim and crown molding on the ceiling), I suggest you paint the ceilings a color, not white. This will reinforce the definition.

To choose colors that refer to the floor color, put the samples directly on the floor and make sure they look good against the color of the floor.

For more specific and complete suggestions, I do offer phone/email consulting. I look at photos and walk you through the process of how to use a fan deck to identify colors. My service includes large paper color samples, a report and is billed by the hour.

See a portfolio of my color consulting work on my site.
contact me at Cristina@CristinaAcosta.com

Kitchen remodels are often the most expensive remodel of any room in the house. If you have laminate counter tops or cabinet faces you don't like, before you invest in entirely new cabinets, consider re-covering the existing laminate.

Formica, Wilson Art and Pionite are popular brands of laminate (also known as "formica"). These companies continually offer new colors, textures and patterns. Here's how I used re-facing cabinets to save myself a bunch of money.

Faced with a 20 year old kitchen with Euro style cabinets covered in a gray laminate that didn't suit my color palette, I decided to investigate new cabinets. Estimates ranged from $20,000 and up to put in new cabinetry. My husband and I decided to spend our remodeling money on new environmentally-friendly windows, plumbing fixtures and flooring (we stretched those dollars with a lot of our labor). After those expenses we had about $1,000 left for the kitchen. We were not very hopeful about any changes we could make. I had done everything I could with paint, but the gray cabinets were still the dominate feature and they didn't work with my foundation color choices.

Remembering cheesy ads from years ago about "cabinet refacing", I decided to investigate how I could take that re-facing idea and come up with something cool.

Looking under "Counter tops" in the Yellow pages, I found a company that advertised Laminates. I visited their showroom and discovered that laminates can be pretty cool. Formica re-issued some 1950's versions that I fell in love with: Boomerang, offered in Mint, Pink or Gray made me smile, remembering California bungalows from my childhood. Wilson Art makes a eggplant purple that was better than anything I could have thought of. I realized that using the accent wall concept, I could break up the dominate gray color in such a way that the gray would look intentional not ignored or tolerated.

Bev-Art, the company in Bend, Oregon put me in touch with their installer, Doug Patterson. He came to my house and after inspecting my cabinets told me what he could do. Because the doors were so finely hung, there was no room for refacing them without a lot of expense, I settled on refacing the sides of the kitchen island and the front panel inserts of my dishwasher and refrigerator. I choose a deep eggplant color. Doug Patterson cut the panels on site and laminated them to the old gray cabinets. I LOVE the result!

I still have gray cabinets, but now, the color is broken up and enough of the bold eggplant purple laminate exists that the gray no longer dominates. The eggplant purple color is a wonderful accent color in the kitchen.

Remember the Boomerang Formica I mentioned? Still in love with it, I had Doug install it on the existing gray counter tops in my Master Bath. It adds the touch of fun my overly serious modern cabinetry was lacking.

Info in Bend Oregon: Bev Art Counter Tops, 541-388-3457.
Installer: Doug Patterson, 541-389-7308

Have you ever stood in front of a color rack at a paint store, starring at hundreds of color samples and felt confused? It can get even worse if you go in thinking that you might remember something about color from a long-ago art class, then discover that nothing makes sense. Here's how to start making sense of what you are seeing and hearing at the paint store. Starting with the right vocabulary is your first step to success.

The way color is discussed by artists or in an academic setting is different from the way color is understood in a paint store. Here are a few terms to use when describing and understanding color:

• Color – Any hue, tint, tone or shade. In other words, any color.
• Color Wheel – A round graphic chart showing the relationship between primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary colors. Used to explain basic color mixing, the principles do not apply directly to how paint stores mix color, as most commercial paints rely on bases to modify the colorant.
• Colorant – The pure pigment that a paint store adds to a base to create a color.
• Base – This is the base product a paint store begins with. It is the “paint” without any colorant added to it. The base color changes depending on the darkness or lightness and the warm or cool tone of the color being mixed. Bases are used only in the paint-store mixing process.
• Hue – Specifically refers to a primary, secondary or tertiary color on the color wheel. Though not specifically accurate, many people use the word interchangeably with the word color.
• Primary Colors – these are the three colors on the color wheel from which every other color is created: Red, Blue and Yellow. Do not use this term to apply to bright colors in general, as you may confuse the person in the paint store who has a more specific vocabulary. Again, paint stores do not mix a color from the primary colors, they begin with bases.
• Complementary Colors – These are pairs of colors that are opposite from each other on the color wheel. Artists mix them together to create beautiful variations that include browns and other “neutral” colors. We’ll use this term when describing the interaction of a variety of colors in the same room. This term doesn’t mean much in a paint-store setting as colors are mixed using a pre-determined combination of a base and colorant.
• Tint – This word has two meanings. To artists and color experts, it means any color that has white mixed into it. In a paint store, it refers to adding colorant to a base.
• Value – The relative lightness or darkness of a color.
• Color Temperature – The relative warmth or coolness of a color.
• Saturation – Refers to a color that is more color than white. The darker and/or “more pure” the color is, the more saturated it is.

See paint colors for interiors on the Project Portfolio page of my website.

All writing and images on this blog are copyright protected by Cristina Acosta

Dear Cristina, (via my website www.CristinaAcosta.com ) I just painted an accent wall in my home. I painted one wall in my LR Sweet Georgia Brown by Behr with a Satin Sheen. This wall is the first wall you see when you walk in the door. On this wall I am mounting a 42 inch flat screen TV. On both sides on the TV I want to mount wrought iron candle sconces, just below a sofa table that will hold receiver and DVD player. My home is in all browns -- light and dark. All wood is in cherry tones. Big beige tile throughout, light and brown tone granite kitchen counter tops. I didn’'t use hardly any of the paint, so I still have over half a gal. I was considering accenting a wall in a different part of the house in the same color. The house is an open floor plan the LR, Kitchen, DR all blends together. The rooms are divided by arches, so you can see that there is a 3 room thing going on but you can see all rooms from all rooms if that makes sense. The kitchen is in the middle, I want to do that in a different color a shade of amber. I do have red accent color throughout Pillows, Pictures, bed spread. And also different shades of beige, Tan, cream, white, and yellow (amber gold). My sofa is dark chocolate brown; coffee tables are dark cherry wood. I have hand carved Buddha masks and a small Buddha panel in cherry wood stain. Decorative Mirrors in bronze wrought iron. Just an idea of what I have going on. What do you think? Any ideas? I and working with 1200 sqft total livable space and 9ft ceiling. Thanks for any help you provide! Christina

Dear Christina,

Sounds like you have an exciting interior design project that is mostly done and now you are in the fine-tuning stages. What you are describing is mostly a monochromatic color scheme (one color). Primarily your color is brown with brown variations in tan, cream, chocolate and beige.

So -- without seeing a thing, I can't get too specific, but I can give you additional suggestions based on the concepts you are working with. These concepts are:

• Brown monochromatic color scheme (formed with parents of red and green) accented in analogous colors.
• Monochromatic color scheme made interesting with variations in:
• • 1. texture 2. color temperature 3. value.

• Great Room concept (blended living areas) where different living areas are grouped together and visible to each other.
  

For a monochromatic color scheme to be interesting it's important to vary aspects of your palette, something you've described doing, such as variations of the same color (or nearly the same) with variations in both value (the lightness and darkness of the colors), texture (smooth wood, granite, tile, textiles, metal), and color temperature (warm cherry wood brown colors contrasted with relatively cool browns like dark chocolate and bronze).

I especially like that you've added a few accents in red and amber. Red and amber are what are called analogous colors. That means that red and yellow (the dominant parent color of amber) are next to each other on the color wheel. Because brown can be mixed with a combination of red with green, by choosing red and amber accents you've done a great job of intuitively choosing accent colors that directly relate to one of the parent colors in the brown blend.

Putting an accent wall in the dark chocolate tones of your monochromatic palette was a good choice as it's a color value variation that creates interest without breaking up your color palette.

I'm giving you a bit of a technical explanation to explain your choices, so you'll know why your intuitive decisions have worked so far.

The amber color in the kitchen is a good choice because the amber color is related to the brown (yellow being an analogous color to red, one of the parent colors of brown). Experiment with at least 3 shades of amber. Choose one that leans towards Green, one that leans towards Red and one that is very Yellow/Brown. Test them to see which looks best with your existing choices.

Send me a picture when you're done. A before and after would be great.

Best Wishes,
Cristina

Note: Click here to read my article about using color, monochromatic color, and accent walls

All writing and images on this blog are copyright protected by Cristina Acosta

Dear Cristina,
I read somewhere that the colors I like tell a lot about my personality and that certain colors can affect my moods. Is it true that you can you tell what a person is like when you see the colors they paint their home? Can color change the way I feel?
J. Vigil

It’s certainly true that color, like music can encourage a particular mood or express an attitude. Don’t get carried away with the symbolic meanings of color just yet. Often a lackluster color scheme is the result of a lack of confidence or knowledge of the design world, not a commentary on one’s character.

If people choose colors with as much confidence as they choose their music, you’d definitely get more of a sense of who they are when you view the results. Far more people are confident about their taste in music that are sure of their color sense. Because of that, many people are afraid to experiment with paint colors and often will choose colors for their home that seem safe – These are usually colors that they think other people will approve.

It’s time for a change. It’s time to ask yourself – What is my color personality?
Doty Horn, the Director of Color at Benjamin Moore Company says, “The trend is going to the individualizing of the color palette so that the person choosing it has a sense of ownership. This is who I am. This is my personality.”
Just as we all don’t dance to the same tunes, paint colors don’t have the exact same effect on everyone. You may find that a color you love in one place doesn’t work at all in another location, whether that’s another room or another home. It’s the same thing that happens when a favorite album cut just doesn’t suit your mood at the moment, or you lose interest in it completely. As you change along with the world around you, so does your perception of color.

Josette Buisson, the Artistic Director of Pittsburgh Paints says“…conclusions (about color) are drawn from more subjective considerations, like the impact of technology on our life, our self-definition, and our relationships to one another.” She has developed a program for Pittsburgh Paints that links paint color choices to personality tendencies.

Though there is certainly scientific evidence that people in the same culture tend to share their response to certain colors, there are many exceptions. I love vibrant reds and use them in a variety of rooms in my home. Someone else may
experience red as over-stimulating and upsetting. Don’t take color advice verbatim.

Take a chance and experiment. Color is one of the most inexpensive design elements you can bring into your home. It is also the most powerful way you can express your personal home style.

So take time to discover which colors really grab you – not just the colors you think you “should” like. Peruse the websites of paint companies. Head to the store and collect paint chips of any paint color you’re interested in. When you have at least a few dozen samples, you’ll start to see a trend. Often you’ll surprise yourself when you see which colors you like.

Follow you heart and be brave with color. Whatever the result, when you surround yourself with your creative choices you will always feel energized and interested in your world.

Large Photo: These two pictures are from the same Hacienda-style home. For this formal yet friendly living room my clients chose wall paint colors in a subdued monochromatic palette of browns and golds. These wall colors express a calm and relaxed yet lush attitude.

Small Photo: A fiesta of color brightens the guest bath. The guest suite is down the hall from the more formal living room. Don’t be afraid to change moods throughout the house. Staying within the Hacienda concept, my clients were able to include more than one color palette.

Read more of Cristina's articles at www.CristinaAcosta.com
Sources:
Benjamin Moore Company www.benjaminmoore.com
Pittsburgh Paint www.voiceofcolor.com
Article first published in Latina Style magazine

Choosing color for your home is one of the most important aspects of decorating; it's what makes your living space inviting, happy, beautiful and uniquely yours. Through the process of choosing colors you begin to consciously create a home that nurtures everyone who lives there, creating a rich and beautiful life for yourself and your loved ones.

Yet this decision-making process is also one of the least understood aspects of decorating - and one of the most scary. I've written several articles about the role of color in interior design that will help you think about color in new ways. Sundrenched or Subdued What's a Latina to Do? is a piece I first wrote for Latina Style magazine. Though the title is spun towards the Hispanic market, my color and design advice works no matter what your social or cultural influences.

Bringing color into your home brings beauty into your daily surroundings and opens your mind to the richness of the world around you. Something as simple as painting a wall can open a door in your thought processes. The more you look at a variety of colors in the changing light of the day, the more sensitive you become to beauty. Become practiced at recognizing beauty in the simplest of things and soon you’ll notice that you’re living an abundant colorful life!
www.CristinaAcosta.com