Living in a Nutshell: Designing Out of the Box

If you live in a nutshell, color is your best friend, your secret weapon. In every apartment and home I have ever nested in, I am always amazed how color can create instant warmth and disguise square foot-challenged spaces. For my new place I decided on gray slate walls for the living room. I have a large water coloring painting by Emily Redd that I adore, and the gray in that painting was the inspiration for the new living room. I clipped and saved an article in House Beautiful that talked about how dark colors on the wall “disintegrates the edges of a small room”…and they were right.	But I quickly learned that there indeed is a “gray area” when it comes to finding the perfect gray paint that wouldn’t change tones on me when it was exposed to full sun and overhead incandescent lighting. House Beautiful magazine suggested Benjamin Moore in Witching Hour #2120-30 but when I went to the paint store it was too light. After examining many, many paint chips outside the store in the sunlight, I decided to go with Benjamin Moore in Wrought Iron #2124-10.
	As I started to paint I got a little panicked that it might be too dark so I decided on a gray and white stripe companion wall and taped off a larger border around the bedroom door to “fool the eye” into thinking there was white molding around the door. The other challenge was that I did all the painting myself and my walls are 14 feet high in some places and given that I am only 5’2” and the ladder was 8’, I was barely reaching the far corners!

But I am so happy with the results and I am amazed how the gray doesn’t turn in hue when the light changes. Gray is the new brown in interior decorating…or at least that’s what I’m telling friends. Pass it on.