Bathroom Paint Colours

Last night I took my students to a Benjamin Moore in Yaletown for a product knowledge session about paint. Michelle Campbell runs the store on Pacific Avenue and this woman knows paint and colour; She makes paint interesting! I walked out of the restroom at the end of the evening and said “I love the creative way the colours were picked in that bathroom” How cool is that!”. Three of my students had to look but they didn’t seem as impressed as me. One said ‘”But the floor is dingy”. And that to me was the point! How to take a dingy, commercial bathroom and bring it to life with just a little paint! Denise Bell, is the colour consultant that came up with this great idea and I loved it!



The walls are painted in ‘Smoke’, but there are many other colours that would have looked great in here as well. Reds, oranges, yellows, fresh green, or even purple! In a bathroom like this, the choices are endless because it doesn’t need to ‘flow' with adjoining rooms!


Here she matched the floor to come up with CC-490, Smoky Taupe and painted a wide stripe right next to it and beside the ceiling. This was the best part of the idea because now you are repeating the existing colour in the floor which creates a more coordinated look.

Then she chose a darker browny/gray shade [Willow] for the door and another stripe in the center of the wall to ground the space and give it some depth! Commercial bathrooms can have the most unattractive floors (just like this one), so if you were dealing with one that had two colours that were just dead, you could repeat those colours in the stripes (on one wall so it’s not overwhelming, like she did here) and then pick a third unrelated colour with some punch and suddenly, the attention is off the previously dingy floor (but then you are not ignoring it either which can make it worse) and the whole space is transformed. That’s the power of colour!!

What do you think?

Related posts:

Another Powder room Colour

Creative Art for the Bathroom