Neutrality: It’s Not Just for the Swiss

Good day, ReDo Readers! What an amazing weekend it was for unexpected autumn weather: sunny, warm – in the upper 80′s here! – and beautiful. We spent the weekend in Chicago, enjoying the changing leaves and warm evening air, strolling around River North, the Loop and the Magnificent Mile. It was a perfect set-up for the 2010 Chicago Marathon as well, as thousands gathered in the downtown area to run their arduous 26 mile course. I watched part of the race, as the runners flew past in their brightly colored shirts and shorts: flashes of red, orange, yellow, blue streaming by in droves. I was struck by how all these hard working athletes wore such vivid bright tones, which then got me thinking how color really enhances our lives and surroundings, from the clothes we wear to the decor in our homes; how we consciously choose to adorn ourselves in these hues that can have profound effect on our moods, emotions, and sense of self. I was also struck by the idea of a world without color, where everything was a neutral tone: shades of browns and beiges, or grays, blacks and whites in different tones and brightness. In this type of setting, would one be able to find “color ” in a space that was neutral? Well, yes!

Obviously, color is fun to work and paint with, but it commits the user to a specific story to tell. When working with neutral tones, you have greater ability to play with the nuance and the suggestion of attitude, emotion and feeling. Think of it like this: if you paint and decorate a room in red, you are definitely telling a bold color story, one that is powerful and daring. Or, if you do the same thing with a vivid green, you are breathing life, nature, renewal, Spring and Summer into the room: providing a sense of growth and freshness in the space.

Your furnishings and accessories for both of these colored spaces would be chosen specifically to compliment those bright hues, and would further reflect the color in and around the space in the decoration – you’d bring more red accent pieces into the red room, or more green accent pieces into the green, unifying the design scheme within the space. Now consider this very same room, painted biege. Or white. Or brown. You have now released yourself from having to be married to a very specific, very pigeon-holed design scheme, and have discovered a whole new outlet for subtlety, nuance and suggestion.

One of my recent projects involved painting a kitchen a beautiful and bright green, nearly a chartreuse, but less bright. This color made the honey coloroed wood cabinets pop, but what it also did for the decor was to limit the other decorative furnishings to wood tones and metal, bringing in other organic green and similar tones from nature, as the client wanted. The space turned out great, and for a kitchen it really brought a feeling of freshness and vitality to an important, oft-used, room. The client liked it as well, which is most important, but it was the color story observation, about the limitations of stretching the color scheme into the other furnishings and decorative aspects, that I valued most.

So after this kitchen project, I reflected on a personal project of mine in which I decorated a space in neutral colors and tones, where nearly everything lacked color. It’s how I decorated my bedroom: the walls a soothing shade of chocolate milkshake, the trim a light creamy sandy tone; the window treatments are done with white canvas drapes and blinds, and the floor a checkerboard pattern of brown and biege fuzzy textured carpet tiles from FLOR. The furniture is a dark java brown wood color with silver hardware; with a ceiling fan/light in silver and gray; and end table lamps in clear arcylic or brushed metals; with horizontal wall mirrors to bring more light in from the windows.

All the decorative accessories are neutral in tone: a white laminated bent-wood desk and chair on silver metal legs; a chair of black leather with brushed stainless arms and legs; and vases that are white, silver, or brown. The only thing of color in the room comes from the art above the bed: four over-exposed paintings of fashion ads, done in pale tones of green, blue, and red, all framed in dark brown. When you look at the collective space as a whole, you start to realize that the sense of color suddenly comes from those items that are lighter in tone. In effect, white now becomes the accent color! Or, if I want to tell a specific color story, all I need to do is swap out the white accent decor for others pieces of a specific color, like adding apple green, or Tiffany blue to the neutral pallette. The beiges and browns create the canvas, the backdrop for the pop of color when I swap-out the items for a different or fresh look.

It’s a pretty interesting concept, and I’m now working with it in a clients bedroom and bathroom, to see how the dichotomy of dark and light, or dark chocolate brown walls with white accessories, play against each other to create a Zen space that doesn’t demand that your eye focus on, or gravitate to, any one particular thing of color. I want to see if, by making the space less demanding visually, I can acheive the same sense of mental peace and calm through the use of neutral tones and hues by adding an additional touch of monochromatic themes through the use of light and dark palettes. The goal for this project is to give my client this very same feeling I describe above, to make his master bedroom and bath a sanctuary, a place to retreat where the mind and soul and reset and refresh each day. I’ll be posting pictures of this project as I finish it, so you can see what this looks like, and get a visual idea of how you, too, can make a color story out of hues that aren’t so colorful.