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Choosing a Palette

Q. Sometimes homeowners are baffled by where to place color. If their favorite color is blue for example, they don't know if they should buy a blue sofa, paint the walls blue, or order blue carpeting. Can you comment on using our favorite colors and ways to incorporate them into home decor?

Tricia Foley: "I always recommend painting patches of color on the wall to try out living with them and looking at the true color at different times of the day...taping up big memo samples of fabric on walls or pinning to existing furniture and spending some time with these "tests" also helps even the professionals make up their minds! Putting together simple boards with all the swatches will give an overview if it's difficult to imagine it all together..."

Rachel Ashwell: "I don't really follow trends as I stick to my palette of pale green, pale pink, pale blue, cream and ivories."

Ann Fox: "I love it when clients have favorite colors and are opinionated. But tastes do change over the years. I like to put color in paint, throw pillows, and chairs -- all the things that can be updated and changed through the years."

Lyn Peterson: "Use the color on the walls. Paint is infinite - you can get the exact right shade. Whereas carpet is very finite, and it's not easy to find the right blue carpet. Remember it is much easier to contrast than to match . The blue of your couch and the blue of your wall and rug may match perfectly in daylight, but then the sun shifts and something is off , or at night the incandescent light bulb makes one blue too green. How often have I stepped out in what I thought was all khaki only to discover that my pants were pinky, shirt yellow, and my jacket grey, yet all tones of kakhi."

"Rooms have a color character. In my first married apartment my husband and I arrived Friday PM and promptly painted the kitchen bright yellow. Saturday AM the sun came out and we practically had to wear sunglasses in that room! In our next kitchen, in our first home, I was determined not to make the same mistake. I wallpapered in a wonderful greyish blue ticking stripe. And the sun never shined in that one window buried behind pine trees. (Well at least I didn't make the same mistake twice!)

"Be sure to check the exposure of your rooms. Also if it is a room with nighttime use, then check the color at the time of day you will inhabit the room and with the kind of lighting you will be using. If that means candles in the dining room then go ahead and light the candles and dim the lights and see what looks good.

"I believe it was DaVinci who discovered that our light sensors don't fire in low light. Every time Leo (we call him Leo) got down off the scaffolding, he discovered that his painting just disappeared. He had to keep intensifying the colors.

"Use strong colors in rooms with short periods of usefulness: dining room, guest room, powder room, hall that you walk through, and not in rooms that you sit in hour after hour like the TV room."

Mary Baltz: "The exciting part about white in the home is it is very easy to layer and change because you have your base canvas. In an all white room you might take one wall and use a pale color, a blue or green, to accent the white. For example over a mantle can be a nice place to add color without changing the whole room. Another ideas is to leave walls white and paint the trim a color such as spring green or a great shade of blue. "

Charlotte Moss: "Painting is cheap, you can often do it yourself, and you can create a lot of effect with color. Try a color you've never tried before -- kiwi green or a pale violet -- something you've always wanted to try. A couple of gallons of paint is a very inexpensive experiment."