COLOUR PALETTE
Selecting the right colour palette is one of the most personal decisions you'll make in your renovation. It can also be some of the most intimidating.
We recommend starting with the biggest, most centrally located space - often, this is your kitchen, living room, and/or dining space. Pale neutrals are a great place to start - soft greys, blues, and greens are approachable and calming.
If you don't have a specific colour in mind, we think you can never go wrong with white. Sometimes, people are afraid that white will make a room feel cold and stark, but we strongly dispute this worry. White spaces provide a clean canvas for everything else to shine - furniture, artwork, accessories. One of our favourite go-to white paints is Benjamin Moore, Chantilly Lace, OC-65. This is a true white, which is both bright and warm - it looks great in sunlit or shadowed spaces.
Our Modern Victorian project uses Chantilly Lace in the kitchen, and throughout the rest of the ground floor. The white paint compliments the white kitchen cabinetry and makes it recede, allowing for the contrasting elements like the marble backsplash and the black light fixture to step forward and shine.
We always recommend sampling paint colours on site to choose the final colour - do not trust the paint swatch! Rather than painting areas on each walls, we like to paint primed drywall samples, approximately 12"x24" and take them with us from room to room. We can then make a judgment call based on the light and adjacent conditions to determine the best colour.
If you have a bold colour vision for one of these central spaces, then don't be afraid to commit. Bold colours can often be complimented with neutral tones, as they give your eye a place to rest between the brighter, more saturated areas. It is riskier to put bold colours beside each other, unless you have a strong handle on colour theory.
In our Beaches Update project, we used deep green jewel-toned cabinets with brass accents in the kitchen. We paired the saturated cabinets with a warm grey stone backsplash, a honed black granite countertop, and a grey quartz on the island.
Once you have selected the paint colour for the central spaces, you can choose shades of the same hue for adjacent rooms or walls, depending on how it looks based on the site conditions.
In a typical Toronto home, If you have an open plan ground floor, you will likely need to carry the paint colour up the stair wall and into your hallway as well, so make sure you think about room adjacencies when selecting your colours.
Since bedrooms are the most private space in a home, they sometimes are a place to experiment with more colourful choices. However, we always like to keep bedroom tones calm, as they are meant to be restful spaces.
In our Beaches Update project, we used a palette of moody blues to set the tone of this master suite. With dark stained oak floors, a medium toned blue for the walls, and a light tone for the ceiling, the eye is drawn upwards, making the room feel spacious.
As a strategy, we generally avoid accent walls, unless they are highlighting a specific architectural feature. For example, in the Beaches Update shown above, the blue wall points upwards to the cathedral ceilings, while the navy on the closets make them feel more rooted to the floor, so that the white ceiling can 'fly' over and behind it.
In our Ritchie Rowhouse project, the sofa niche is accented with gold leaf, which provides a sunny, semi-reflective surface that compliments the giant window assembly beside it.
In the Ritchie Rowhouse project above, the accented area is a niche behind the sofa, which is of the same scale as the window beside it, so accenting it with the gold leaf makes it feel like another large opening in the room.
We'll end with a final thought about small rooms, like bathrooms and laundry rooms - particularly those without any natural light. Though we said above that you can never go wrong with white, the only exception to this rule is in these small spaces. Though it may seem counter intuitive, using white paint in rooms with little or no natural light will make the room feel flat, drab, and sad. In these spaces, consider a medium toned neutral colour, or even a bold or dark dramatic choice.
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Written by Charisma Panchapakesan, OAA
