Restaurant Colour Themes; Heaven vs. Hell or Clean and Dirty

At High Point Market I had two very different experiences dining out. The restaurant below is in The Proximity hotel where a few of us had dinner the second night I arrived. We walked into this serene, beautiful space with fabric panels dividing the restaurant into sections, oval backed slipped chairs in green and white with the early evening light filtering into the room. Simple, elegant, divine. If I had heard angels singing I would not have been surprised.

Then I had the opposite experience in another restaurant when Traci Zeller, Laura Casey and I arrived for the Editor at Large presentation at lunch.

I’m guessing whoever designed this space probably did it this way (below) intentionally. You might love it! I'm just not a big fan of Halloween or decor that reminds me of this day.

This empty full room shot was taken by Eddie Ross right before his presentation the next day

In Vancouver we have a restaurant called Hell’s Kitchen (below). The exterior is bright screaming yellow and black, and this one could very well have had the same name.

Image via Hell’s Kitchen

This is such a perfect space to show you clean and dirty colours that I couldn’t resist snapping photos as soon as I sat down. My biggest issue with the colours in this space was that there is zero relationship between the decor of the restaurant and the wall colour. And the chosen red and orange screamed way too primary and bright.

Since it actually was set underground with a huge skylight above us, it could have been called Hell’s Kitchen and been totally perfect!

Personally, I felt disturbed sitting in this space, the right red (way more toned down and muted than this one) would have at least not clashed so badly with the chairs, stone wall and urns in the dining room. But then walking down the halls to the restroom was a whole other experience!

Now with the black concrete floors and the red walls there was no relief from the Halloween themed feeling!

Even the washroom was more red mixed with the orange from the dining area in stripes! I really couldn’t wait to leave.

Photos by Maria Killam

The biggest mistake designers and homeowners make with colour is in the clean and dirty category (given that all colour is defined either, cool or warm, clean or dirty, light or dark). When a reader emails me a photo because they have a room bothers them and they need to know why, simply understanding how to mix clean and dirty colours accurately is the fix in many cases. This doesn’t mean you should not mix clean and dirty colours but it should never happen by accident because that’s usually when it looks bad.

A good place to learn how to combine colours accurately is in my course (I know it’s the perfect plug for my True Colour Expert Workshops). But these kinds of colour mistakes are expensive!

Image via Simplified Bee

Happy Halloween Everyone!

If you would like your home to fill you with happiness every time you walk in, contact me for on-line or in-person decorating and colour.

Related posts:

A Dirty Answer to a Clean Question

Clean ALWAYS Trumps Dirty

The Difference between an Experienced Colourist and a Novice

New to this Blog? Click here ; Subscribe to my free Monthly Newsletter; Become a True Colour Expert (new dates)

Clean ALWAYS trumps Dirty

Photo by Artful Magpie via Flickr

I have found myself repeating this statement a lot lately so I thought I’d write a post about it. So, repeat after me; Anytime that you find yourself comparing a clean colour to a dirty one, the clean colour always looks better. Does this mean the dirty colour is wrong?

NO.

Photo by my client

For example, the colour on the house currently being tested is a pale butterscotch colour. The blue on the left is BM HC-146 and the one on the right is HC-104. Right now, the colour on the right looks dirty and muddy because not only is the butterscotch a cleaner colour but so is the blue. While both are good options for the exterior of this house, it’s hard to see that the greeny gray on the right is even remotely an option because it just looks ugly. Here it is on an exterior:

Photo by Maria Killam

See, not ugly at all. When I get the ‘after’ photos of the above consultation, I’ll post them. In the meantime, if you are testing exterior colour, it needs to be much BIGGER so you can see the colour in context for what it is.

Are you still painting your exterior this season? It’ll get too cold soon, so hurry up :)

If you would like your home to fill you with happiness every time you walk in, contact me for on-line or in-person decorating and colour.

Related posts:

How to test Exterior Colour; 3 Steps to get it Right

A Dirty Answer to a Clean Question

How to pick Exterior Colours without a Designer

New to this Blog? Click here ; Subscribe to my Monthly Newsletter; Become a True Colour Expert

A Dirty Answer to a Clean Question

A reader posted the following comment/question which I thought I would address in this post;

“One term you frequently use disturbs me, and that is the word "dirty" to describe those colors which are not bright or primary. Well, dirty can be fun and has it's place ;) - - but it doesn't seem to belong in the decorating lexicon. My understanding is the creation of such colors includes adding a minute amount of paint from the opposite side of the color wheel. Why not call these complex colors? Or if that won't work, invite suggestions from your readers for something better?”

Image source

Yes you are correct in that an orange colour (for example) is muddied or muted, therefore ‘dirty’ by adding blue (from the opposite side of the colour wheel).

Image source

And thanks for asking such a great question! You are not the first person to be disturbed by the terminology. Here is the reason I say ‘dirty’;

1) It’s the opposite of Clean, so from a language standpoint, it just makes sense.

2) Clients understand clean vs. dirty when I’m showing them colour and discussing the context of each choice we are making.

Interior design by Markham Roberts

You are welcome to use whatever terminology works for you! Another way of describing a ‘dirty’ colour is by saying it’s muted, or toned down, or if you feel more comfortable, call it a complex colour as you suggested (all of them are right)!

It’s the way I learned it, and just to recap; Colour can only be described in three ways, it is ALWAYS either;

1) Clean or Dirty

2) Light or Dark

3) Cool or Warm

Interior design by Markham Roberts

Click here to read a post that explains it further.

Related posts:

The three ways to describe colour

The Difference between an experienced Colourist and a Novice

Colour is Context

How to make your Old Carpet look new using Colour!

One of my past students at Vancouver Community College, Nour Enayeh recently completed a decorating project with a Montessori school. This is the ‘after photo’ (the before is the second one). She said that the Montessori program believes that kids should not have a bunch of primary colours to distract them from their activities, so the room definitely has a calmer feeling, than the normal appearance of a kindergarten classroom.

Before

The client wanted to change the carpets as they were dirty (not that we can see that here in the photos) but it was not in the budget. However she did pick a new colour for them (HC-33) above, and Nour said that after it was painted everyone was asking if they had installed new carpet.

I was once called out to pick colours for the hallways of 2 very large apartment buildings. The strata was very unhappy with the existing gray carpeting in the halls because (in their opinion) it looked dirty from the time it was installed (2 years previously) and they were discussing replacing it. I saw the problem immediately and it was that the colour [on the walls] was way too clean. It was a very pale and clean yellow, OC-114 called Lemon Ice.

I explained that the way to correct this was to choose a ‘muddier yellow’ and I selected 2153-50, Desert Tan. You can see the difference between these colours was huge, and it was quite the transformation because now the gray carpet looked like the right carpet and colour for the space instead of pre-maturely dirty, which is what they thought. That is the power of colour!

Nour also put on her decorative painter hat and painted the tree as well, she used HC-34 Wilmington Tan for the tree trunk.

After

Nour said that the images she took with her camera actually made the wall colour look more green (she took them with a flash because it was late in the afternoon), but the colour actually was a perfect match to the carpeting.

Great job Nour, thanks for sharing these with us!

Related Post:

Clean vs. Dirty Colours

The Right way to Create Flow using Colour

Thank you to the Washington Post for including this post in your blog watch, March 19, 2009!

When a client calls me to inquire about a colour consultation, here’s the question they need answered more than anything else: How do you create flow, and how do you transition the colour from one room to another? In addition to this, people want to know why the colour works or why it doesn’t? The process of narrowing down all the possibilities (from over 2,000 colours) to the one that is perfect for you is worth every penny. A professional will give you colour ideas that you never imagined, after all this is what they do every day. The following images illustrate the best way to create flow in your home.

Maria Killam Colour & Design

This is a living room I designed for one of my lovely clients Suzanne, two years ago. She recently hired me to complete her den and I met with her last week to finalize the selections. First though, a lesson on creating flow:

Suzanne had this colourful artwork by Vancouver artist Debi MacKinnon (shown above) and which we used for inspiration. She loved all the colours and especially the orange and fuscia, so that’s what we used for the accent colours in her condo. The colour we used as the ‘main wall colour’ in her space was HC-18 Adam’s Gold: Adam’s Gold is actually a yellow on the green side. And as I tell my students, these greeny yellows mostly just work with bright, jewel tone colours like we used in this space. With bright or rich dramatic colours (such as red or eggplant) using a greeny/yellow keeps the space more sophisticated than if we used a regular warmer, orange based yellow like HC-12 Concord Ivory. We then used a cotton velvet in a slightly darker shade for the sofa.

She loved the bright orange in the art, so we picked an orange from the deck, which was a little too bright so we took it to the paint store with the fabric I had found for the toss cushions and toned it down slightly, so the colour you see above is a custom orange. The closest one we ended up with is 2169-10 Racing Orange.

We selected 2076-10 Crushed Velvet as another accent in her living room (shown in the toss cushions below):

Then we used that same accent in the powder room and hung some artwork that also repeated the colours she already had in her space.

In her bedroom we introduced a lighter shade of purple (than the above flower in the bathroom) while still keeping the colours in the same, fresh colourful palette as her living room.

HC-115 Georgian Green and 2070-40 Spring Purple. This (below) is the drapery fabric we selected for her bedroom.

In the den (before and after to be show upon completion) we chose 2 chairs which we will upholster in the velvet (shown below) in the ‘Crushed velvet’ shade from the bathroom and the accent colour in her living room. The drapery was our favourite fabric. And it repeats the fuscia colour as well (it’s slightly lighter as you can see). Then we chose an ostrich faux leather for a round ottoman. We will also repeat the white in the entertainment center for her TV and bookshelves. What makes this perfect for her space, when she needs extra seating in the living room, she can pull out the chair from the den and it will look just like it belongs there.

The colour we chose to tie in with the drapery is CC-338 Bluffs which was darker then the fabric. You can’t tell by looking at the photo though right? Don’t ever make the mistake of assuming the colour is right by just holding it next to the fabric like it is shown in the above photo. To make sure that it was the right colour, we held the fabric up by the window, then held the sample behind the fabric, we also held it up in the corner of the window (with the colour beside it to ensure accuracy). For even closer accuracy (of course) a bigger sample should be painted up just to be on the safe side.

Many people think that the only way to create flow is to take one colour and go from light to dark throughout the entire house. However, it’s really about keeping the ‘fresh’ colours together and ‘dirty colours together. If you mix them up, that’s what creates problems with flow including the feeling that gets created in your home.

If you don’t have a ‘perfect’ scenario where you can basically decorate your entire home at once to create the kind of palette I have shown here, then you need to decide which rooms you will ‘move forward’ using current colours and which ones need to coordinate with the existing colours in the home. For example, if I am in a house that is mostly renovated, except for the bathroom, I will ignore the flow in this case, and just pick a colour that coordinates with the existing tile in the bathroom. I would rather specify the best possible colour with existing (dated) finishes, to make it look as good as possible in a bathroom that is not going to see a renovation anytime soon, than worry that much about how it works with the rest of the house.

So my lovelies, what is the undertone of the above beige?

Related posts:

Insider Secrets to Testing & Selecting Paint Colours

What Everyone Should Know about Beige

What’s an Undertone?

Clean vs. Dirty Colours

Should your Interior Colours flow with the Exterior of your House?

New to this Blog? Click here ; Subscribe to my Monthly Newsletter; Become a True Colour Expert