Believe it or not, cool grays are hot. This Washington Post article by Katherine Salant explains how more homeowners and interior designers are turning to grays for their home interior designs.
If you ask a thousand people to name their favorite color, you might get one that would say gray.
But look at any lifestyle or shelter magazine and you’ll see that gray is hot and seemingly here to stay.
Though white remains the best selling color for most categories of home furnishings, gray is catching up.
Not only have homeowners embraced gray for things that are easy to change — such as wall colors or throw pillows — they also have embraced gray for things they expect to be using 10, 20 and even 30 years from now, including kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures.
As a color, gray encompasses everything from a soft silver to a stark, dark charcoal. It’s the perfect neutral because it’s compatible with almost every other color, and it folds easily into every style of decor. Dee Schlotter, color brand manager for Glidden Paints, succinctly summed it up: “Gray plays well with other colors.”
Though most people think of gray as a 50-50 mix of equal parts black and white, most grays are actually a mix of other colors that give it a unique chameleon-like quality. A gray wall paint that appears to be slightly greenish when upholstered furniture with a strong green theme is placed against it will acquire a slightly bluish cast if the furniture is reupholstered in blue tones. All this has obvious advantages: As London-based interiors blogger Kate Watson-Smyth pointed out, “You don’t have to worry about redecorating every time you change a piece of furniture.”
Gray’s trajectory toward a central position in the home-decorating pantheon began about six or seven years ago as a desire for a “new neutral.” After nearly two decades of nothing but “beige, beige, beige,” said Jackie Jordan, director of color marketing at Sherwin-Williams, “We were beiged out.”
A desire to connect with nature and bring the colors of the outdoors inside and timing also account for gray’s increasing popularity, said Lita Dirks, an interior designer based in Greenwood, Colo. “As we got through the recession, people wanted to ‘open the window’ and make a more efficient cleaner look that went in another color direction. All the softer colors of nature come from the family of gray, so it was an obvious way to go.”
