The warm pink wall paint color ties together the variety of pinks in the marble and metallic cabinet faces. Wall paint color: Benjamin Moore - Lake House 1175. (Note: this color works beautifully in this particular light and architectural setting - please test it carefully before using it in your home). Photo Credit - Paula Watts

Mixing metallics into your home design can give a small space a stylish vibe. Put the metallic accents on existing cabinetry and your small space can remain clear and uncluttered – both practically and visually. And when those metallics come in a coppery pink tone, the result is gorgeous!

Metallic finishes can play up modern architecture like this master bath at the same time they link traditional materials like marble with the contemporary shapes of the home design.

The perfect wall paint color brings together the variety of surfaces with a unified color. With that in mind, choosing the color that works with every color in the bathroom is very important. Helping my clients choose the best color for the room meant first determining a few basic concepts. Here’s a list of things I consider and the thought process I went through to arrive at my choice that may help you:

• Should the color function as a warm color or a cool color?

Pink is usually perceived as a cool color. But in this instance, it was important that the pink be perceived as a warm color. By choosing a very warm pink with yellow and earth undertones the pink copper cabinet facing and the warm pink and brownish tones in the marble were “pushed” to the warm side of perception.

• What is the percentage of warm to cool tones in the space?

The warm white of the marble is “pushed” to function as a cool accent color against the warm tones of earthy pink. The cool tone is about 20% of the total color plan. This is a good balance as one color temperature being dominant strengthens the overall design.

Choosing wall paint colors can be complicated. Remember to consider basic concepts like overall color temperature and you’ll be able to make an informed color choice.  If it’s too much for you, give me a call.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Thank you Paula Watts for your beautiful photo.

One of the unexpected changes that can happen to the aging eye includes the color yellow. For some people the lens of the eye becomes increasingly dense and more yellow with age. With that change, contrast sensitivity declines and dark colors can be difficult to distinguish from each other.

The yellowing effect may not be affecting you personally, but if you are a retailer or manufacturer selling products, how your products are being perceived by the older customer with this condition affects your sales.

The color yellow is common in many natural landscapes throughout the year. I took this photo of bamboo stalks in Bordeaux, France while walking through the public garden in the downtown.

Yellow labels can “disappear” against a bright yellow background. Decreased contrast sensitivity can cause blue and black  or blue and green to appear the same. White or light colored type on a black or dark colored background may be almost impossible to read for that customer.

Colors not only affect people differently because of personal and cultural conditioning and experiences. The visual  abilities of each person affects how and if they perceive a color. Keeping in mind the possibility for differences in color perceptions is especially important for color consultants. Yellow is not always a sunny color.

Read more about the aging eye at LighthouseInternational.org

www.CristinaAcosta.com

The yellow loft roofs the dining area and juts into the space of the living room of this home. The shape as well as the color act as a bridge between the red dining room walls and the green living room walls.

One thing leads to another. That’s as true in life as it is for interior design. It’s especially true if you’ve ever started remodeling or redecorating just one room of a home, then stood back when it was done only to realize that other areas of the house need updating.

And in the same sense, one color leads to another as you walk through any building. Creating a paint color scheme blending good color design with the architecture of your home is like putting together a 3-D puzzle. One part of that puzzle changes and everything changes. And change can be complicated.

It’s easy to think about home color as mostly about the walls, but the reality is that the walls, floors, ceiling, trims and decor are all design elements that combine within the open spaces of the home. Now add to that the thousands of choices you have in most any tile, furniture, lighting and paint store and the puzzle pieces of design that seemed so easy to sort are now in danger of becoming a pile of confusing shapes and colors.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by color, you’re not alone. Putting together entire interior design color schemes can be a lot to think about. But, mixing colors around your home gets a little simpler if you think about those color combinations as a master color plan.

Creating a master color plan is what I do for my clients. They choose the paint colors they like and I help them make those choices (or similar choices) work with the rest of their home decor as well as the architecture of the home.

Here are a few tips I share with color consulting clients to help them organize their interior paint colors:

• Identify the colors in your home that you aren’t going to change, such as the flooring, kitchen cabinetry, window coverings, countertops, etc., and be sure that the paint colors you choose complement the colors of those things.
• Look at the paint colors in natural light and at night under artificial light to be sure the color looks good 24/7.
• Sample your color choices in several places of the room so that you can see the effect of light on the paint color.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

The gold paint color reminds me of the sand of the beach near my childhood home. The addition of blue and green create a graphic triad of landscape colors in this stairwell area.

Visualize “fire engine red” and the color red rushes to mind with or without a vision of the wheels. It’s the same for “grass green”, “sky blue” or “chocolate brown”. Seeing color is such a natural condition that we often don’t question why we see colors and we presume that everybody sees the same colors.

Though most of us do see the same colors, some people can’t. Men (about 5-8% and about 1% in women) with congenital color-blindness may not even know the exact extent of their color blindness until professionally tested. And seeing the same colors is no guarantee towards agreement.

When I was a painting student in art school my professor asked me to randomly choose “Coca-Cola red” from a group of red color chips. I confidently picked a red, sure that it matched my memory of the color. When the professor produced a bottle of Coke and had me put my sample up to the logo, I was surprised to find my choice, though close, was not completely accurate.

Since then, decades of working with color and honing my color sense have increased my understanding of how precise the eye can be. For years I’ve mixed color as an artist, continually refining my experience with both the components of a color and how it appears next to other colors. I’ve also realized that my memories of  colors are only broadly accurate.

The color of the beach sand near my childhood home in Playa del Rey, California, is golder to me in my memories than the actual vial of sand from that beach that I collected for a keepsake. That’s because the expanse of sand and the light of the day make the color experience.

So, when I incorporated the gold of the sand into my home interior design color plan I went with the color that best bridged my color memories, the vial of beach sand  and the reality of my living room walls. I compromised between the color I held in my mind and what my  brain and eyes were telling me.

Learning about the neuroscience behind how the brain and the eyes  see color is the topic of Mark Changizi’s book,  The Vision Revolution. It’s a wonderful book from a man who describes himself as a  “theoretical neuroscientist”. Even if your interest in color is currently limited to what color to paint your living room accent wall, you’ll find that Changizi’s book will inform and enlighten your understanding of how the mind works and that how you physiologically perceive color affects your entire life.

www.CristinaAcosta.com Note: I have an affiliate arrangement with Amazon.com. Clicking on the icon for Changizi’s book and purchasing it through this link will result in a small financial support of this blog.

White comes in many colors from warm beige whites to cool blue whites.

Crisp and fresh or harsh and sterile, a laundry line of contradictory meanings flap around the color white. How we understand color is based on who and where we are. And the meaning color has for us can change along with changes in our lives and our location. White on a tropical island is a very different experience from  white (as snow) covering a northern winter landscape.

I was looking at the color white  last week and realized that for me, white had became a symbol of global interconnection. How did a color I see every day suddenly have a new meaning? Here’s what happened.

Last week an early season snow of over 5 inches fell around my home in Oregon. As the snow piled up (and the shock wore off!) I noticed a strange thing about the color of the snow. It was tinged a warm white. At first the warm white color of the snow wasn’t noticeable, but as the layer of stained snow thickened, it was obvious that something unusual had happened.

Poking my fingers into the top layer of snow, I could remove that soil tinged beige layer of snow to reveal the cold blue-white layer of snow beneath that had fallen earlier as part of the same storm. It was a beautiful contrast of whites.

The next day the news reported that a dust storm in the neighboring state of Washington near Moses Lake over 300 miles away from my  home in Bend, Oregon had tinged the snowfall with the warm red topsoil from Eastern Washington farm lands.

Mother Nature was giving us a lesson in whites along with a reminder that the borders we humans put around our cities, states, territories and countries are invisible to her. During those moments I spent looking at the subtly colored layers of white snow, white became my new “green”.

The idea of white as a unifying color isn’t new. The color white is regularly used in home decor as an interior or exterior paint trim color that repeats often enough around a home that it unifies a variety of other colors. White is so popular in architecture that some paint companies such as Benjamin Moore, Pittsburgh Paints and Sherwin Williams have over one hundred whites in their paint lines to choose from.

White is everywhere from underwear to outerwear. It’s in most everybody’s closet and has been for decades. White dress shirts have been a mainstay of men’s business fashion for over a century. From baby diapers to bed sheets, the color white in some variation is one color I would bet most people on the planet have. Billions of people and the color white. The meanings will keep on.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Ambient lighting and task lighting are created with a combination of recessed light fixtures, pendant lights and an over-sized skylight. Most nights, the starlight and moonlight through the skylight illuminate the kitchen with cool blue light.

Light reflected from a surface into our eyes (then sorted out by our brain) is what we perceive as color. Without the proper indoor light fixtures and lighting design, color perception is compromised. Here are some tips and links to get you started on your home lighting design plan:

Dr. Susan MacDonald’s Tips for Better Vision at Home

• Increase the wattage or lumens (in the case of fluorescent bulbs) of the light bulbs in task areas as needed.
• Hire a lighting expert to assess the lighting design of your home, paying extra attention to task areas and lighting for safety (stairs, etc).
• Get an eye exam every two years with an ophthalmologist to ensure your eyes are healthy.

When Darkness Leads to Depression it’s Time for Light Therapy

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a serious type of depression that happens to some people with the changing of the seasons from Summer to Fall/Winter. Sometimes light therapy using specifically designed light boxes or fixtures will successfully manage this type of depression. The Mayo Clinic website has great information about this disorder.

Save Energy One Bulb at a Time

One energy saving compact fluorescent light bulb can save up to $30 in electricity costs over the lifetime of the bulb. The down side is that these bulbs contain mercury and need to be carefully removed and recycled when they break. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) encourages you to educate yourself about these bulbs. Check out the www.EnergyStar.gov site for details. When you’re ready to trash a bulb with mercury, call your local recycler to learn where to recycle the bulbs. The consumer page of the American Lighting Association website details how to safely remove a broken bulb.

Lighting and Eyesight Sources & Helpful Links:

Dr. Susan MacDonald, www.LaheyClinic.org
www.AmericanLightingAssociation.com
www.MayoClinic.com
www.EnergyStar.gov

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Dear Cristina,

As the season shifts to the shorter days and gloomy weather of winter I sometimes feel more tired than usual. I’ve heard that lighting can make a big difference in how I feel in my home. Do you have any suggestions that will help me get through the Fall and Winter holiday season feeling “brighter”?

Kika G.

Dear Kika,

Brightening your home can brighten your life. In fact, improved lighting can even save you a trip to the eye-doctor. The shorter days of winter require brighter interior lighting to ward off tired eyes and if you’re over 30, you may need to amp up the light in your home just to do the same tasks you did when you were younger.

Even though you’ve gotten a bit older, it’s not necessarily true that you need stronger glasses (though a doctor has the last word). Sometimes, the lighting in your home is the problem. Though a room may seem well lit to one person, another person may perceive the same room as poorly lit.

A skylight adjacent to the electric light fixture in this bathroom enhances the light quality by adding the natural element of sunlight.

Here’s why. After our twenties, the amount of light we perceive with our eyes changes. According to Dr. Susan MacDonald of the Lahey Clinic and Assistant Professor at Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts, the population of rods (the photo receptor cells in the retina of the eye) decreases subtly with every decade as we age. Our ability to tell black from white is called contrast sensitivity. “Though a person’s visual acuity such as having 20/20 vision may be good,” says Dr. MacDonald, “it’s decreased contrast sensitivity that often causes patients to perceive their vision is changing.”

If we’re lucky enough to grow old, our perception of light may eventually be as though we are wearing dark sunglasses in a dimly lit room. Dr. MacDonald tells her patients that, “Many times it’s not the prescription of your glasses that needs to change, it’s the amount of illumination that needs to increase.”

So, if you’ve been living in the same home for a number of years without any upgrades to the lighting, it may be time to add some wattage to keep up with your vision needs. Here are a few things you need to know to assess the lighting you have and make some positive changes.

There are three categories of lighting: Ambient or general room lighting, task lighting and accent lighting. Ambient lighting gives you a level of brightness that enables you to see well enough to walk around the room. Task lighting is usually found in the kitchen and bathroom as well as reading areas. And, accent lighting is all about drama and design, like spotlighting a favorite art piece or potted plant.

These are not strict categories. A light fixture can satisfy more than one of the three categories. For example, a table chandelier with directional spotlights provides both ambient lighting to the room along with task lighting for doing homework or playing games. Accent lighting such as a wall sconce may both illuminate an architectural detail and contribute to the ambient lighting.

Unless your home is very old, you won’t have to break open walls to put in more lighting. The easiest way to start is by adding lamps. If you have existing overhead single center fixtures, a very handy do-it-yourself type or an electrician can install a contemporary pendant style fixture or a track light for more illumination. If you want to add a little nighttime drama to a room, have the electrician add dimmers to some of the existing switches.

The trends in lighting are varied from the traditional to the modern, and available in a variety of finishes and materials. You may want to choose designs with a certain style or mix fixtures for an eclectic look. With all of the options available, you’ll have fun finding something to match your décor. There are so many great choices in lighting fixtures and products at a variety of prices that I’m sure you’ll find fun ways to bring more light into your home.

Cristina

www.CristinaAcosta.com