Your true colors

Forget neutral hues; decorate boldly in the tones you love, two designers urge

A cheery hue of yellow (No. 25 from the color bars interior designer and author Elaine Ryan created), softened with a layer of white lattice, brightens the sunroom of her home in Connecticut.
A cheery hue of yellow (No. 25 from the color bars interior designer and author Elaine Ryan created), softened with a layer of white lattice, brightens the sunroom of her home in Connecticut.

— For many of us, subtlety rules when it comes to decorating our home’s interior. Emerald green walls in the living room? Get real.

photo

Courtesy of Tobi Fairley Interior Design

Coral covers the walls and ceiling of this room; touches of white and black add contrast and interest.

Tangerine in the dining room? Forget it.

Instead, many homeowners select whites, beiges, creams, ecru, sandstone and taupe for the walls and even the furnishings, adding just a touch of color here and there. The theory?

The neutrals serve as a clean slate that can be accented with a pop of color here and there.

For others, understated is underwhelming.

They want to wash their worlds in color, saturate their spaces and home in on the hues to make their personal places pop.

Interior designer Elaine Ryan of Woodbury, Conn., is a longtime advocate of using bold colors in interior design.

“We are very much concerned with our homes being a warm, welcoming and soothing place for us,” Ryan says. “And because of that, our friends may fill their homes with beige, white and neutrals, but that’s not really their personality. Sometimes we are so worried about pleasing other people that we don’t know what we want. Instead, our homes should express our personality and our feelings. What we want is beautiful colors.”

Tobi Fairley agrees. The Little Rock designer, who has had her own firm since 1999 (tobifairley.com), has made a name for herself. Her work often appears in national interior design magazines.

“Color is an important part of how we experience our surroundings, period,” Fairley says. “Use color to tell the story you want to tell. It is a way to let a space say exactly what you want it to.”

Ryan, who has worked as an interior designer for more than 30 years, is the author of Color Your Life: How to Design Your Home with Colors From Your Heart and recently, along with her daughter and fellow designer Lauren Rosenberg, has created the Elaine Ryan Home Decorating Kit: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Own Interior Designer ($69.95).

The kit, contained in a stylish box, includes a 158-page guidebook, two fan decks of coordinating color swatches, a grid board for testing floor plans with 200 reusable furniture templates and a pair of booklets - one with advice for working with a child to design his bedroom and another in which Ryan questions long-held design beliefs. See elaineryan.com for details. The kit, she says, is aimed at teaching the homeowner how to design.

COLOR ON THE CANVAS

“So many times, I’ve heard people say, ‘I love color, but I’m afraid to use it,’” Ryan says.

Fairley says she believes that fear is rooted in a homeowner’s worry about making a bold statement.

“They could also lack confidence about knowing how to use it well and so they leave it out to play it safe with neutrals. I think plenty of safe design choices are made from a concern about how long it will be fresh or relevant.”

Fairley says she believes neutrals are colors, too, and tell their own stories.

“If you look closely at my designs, you’ll notice that I use neutrals a lot and then add colors and patterns to tell the story of the room,” Fairley says. “Beige is great if it’s the right color for a particular room, if it achieves the goals you want to achieve.”

Ryan is not a fan.

“Beige is bland and boring when it’s used on every wall in every home,” she says, adding that the hesitancy to delve into a more colorful design is a result of having hues slowly being removed from our living environments over time.

“Color was slowly bred out of us beginning in the 1930s, starting with the Arts and Crafts and Art Deco movements and then with the modernistic German Bauhaus movement,” she says. “Before them, the Victorians used these dark gem colors like emerald green and rose reds.

“But we were told color makes a room heavy and that a serene home was a beige one. And that beige and white are neutral tones while real colors are at war and clash with one another.”

Fairley suggests that while very deep or dark colors on walls can feel confining in smaller spaces, one way to incorporate color in a very small space that needs to open up more is to choose a more neutral wall color and bring in very bold colors on upholstery, drapes, and accessories.

“I have also used very bold colors in small spaces and used mirrors and contrasting architectural details to keep it feeling open,” Fairley says.

She adds that the key to using vibrant color effectively - so it won’t wear out its welcome - comes down to proper placement.

“For instance, I wouldn’t want to paint a yoga studio electric pink, but an entry? Yes. It’s about knowing which spaces you will want to energize you and which ones you will want to be relaxing havens.”

FEATHERING THE NEST

The key to having the confidence to embrace color and wrap it around the inside of your living spaces revolves around exploring which hues love and then making use of them.

“First, know thyself,” Ryan says.

When it comes to color, Fairley says, she often goes with her gut rather than any type of guideline.

“I don’t know if there really are any hard and fast rules for using color,” she says. “I work from a kind of color intuition that I think many people have on some level; it’s like having an ear for music. My advice about using color is to try lots of combinations and find the ones that inspire you.”

HomeStyle, Pages 33 on 02/09/2013

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