Color Comes Home, and How!

Rose Gilbert
Sun, 30 Nov 2014 21:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

Q: We're heading south for the winter — enough gray and drizzle! And enough dark wood furniture! We look forward to refreshing our condo with bright colors and patterns. Can you tell us what's new?

A: The news in hues is that they are really happening, and not just in vacation homes closer to the Equator.

If the High Point Furniture Market is any indication, all America is heading for brighter colors and sprightlier patterns at home.
Updated: Mon Dec 01, 2014

Q: We're heading south for the winter — enough gray and drizzle! And enough dark wood furniture! We look forward to refreshing our condo with bright colors and patterns. Can you tell us what's new?

A: The news in hues is that they are really happening, and not just in vacation homes closer to the Equator.

If the High Point Furniture Market is any indication, all America is heading for brighter colors and sprightlier patterns at home.

One reason: Our daily lives are saturated with color. On TV, in films, on our personal devices, color communicates a sense of fun, of adventure and excitement. Makes sense that we've also become more comfortable living in homes surrounded by bright hues and personality patterns.

Another reason: Color and pattern are not only easily available today; they're also affordable and practical. No longer need home decorators view bright colors and extroverted patterns with inhibition and suspicion: "Too loud, too busy. ... I'll get tired of it too soon."

Change is today's favorite constant. We crave what's new — it's the American way. And we especially relish refreshing and updating our home environments.

New technologies have made it easy, bringing us saturated colors that won't stain or fade — even outdoors in the elements — and digitally printed patterns that dramatically speed up the process, thereby reducing manufacturing costs, and lowering consumer prices.

There were many such bright spots at the recent Furniture Market. The joyous colors, novel textures, and glamorous finishes introduced at High Point in October will be arriving next spring at decorating stores all over the U.S. Look for pearlized and iridescent leathers, for fabrics over-embroidered with silver and gold threads, and for color combinations that will energize any interior, northerly or tropical.

Speaking of the tropics — and finally answering your question — teal and lime look new all over again in the happy room we show here, bright with what Taylor King furniture calls its "Ultra-Saturated" collection. As insouciant as a calypso festival, the pieces fairly dance with playful color and patterns.

Decorate with this kind of warmth and vigor, and you could go on vacation every day without leaving home.

Q: But what about the trend to gray?

A: It's still gaining momentum on the home color hit parade. But don't confuse 21st-century gray with dull, depressing or gloomy.

Today's gray is, well, colorful; watch it morph from violet to silver and back again, with bling thrown in, like metallic patterns printed on wallpapers, and a sprinkling of crystals winking in curtain fabrics.

Designer Mary Sferra took gray to the max in the bedroom she created for the Designer Showhouse of New Jersey last month (benefiting the Hackensack University Medical Center Foundation). She crowned the bed with a towering headboard plush with gray velvet, dressed the bed itself in layers of gray silk sheets, and then, for good measure, refinished the floor with a "whitewash" of gray.

Rose Bennett Gilbert is the co-author of "Manhattan Style" and six other books on interior design. To find out more about Rose Bennett Gilbert and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.Creators.com.