Color in house
A brush with the bold
Designers use colors in radically different ways. Some choose brilliant shades and decorate fearlessly. Others make a splash by showing restraint. You can follow their lead and do it too.
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These people are not timid. They understand the power of color, that it can update a room, create a space that's welcoming, highlight an architectural detail and camouflage a flaw.
But color is more than visual fizz. It changes us. Robin's-egg blue is calming, while neon orange makes us edgy.
Color, too, changes. It is influenced by light, climate and its immediate surroundings. That's why Chinese red, Mexican pink, Indian saffron and Southwest terra cotta often look best in their birthplaces.
Complicating everything for those of us who think gray is a bold step is the fact that no one sees color the same way. Your red-orangy Coca-Cola red may look like someone else's stoplight red.
And the names: Vanishing Point and Cumulous? Can't we just say white?
No. It's a world filled with Apricot Butter, Mistletoe, Mushroomy Elephant. And those of us not fluent in the language have to learn it.
But we hesitate. We worry about burning up our money, time and pride only to be forced to live in something that doesn't reflect our tasteful selves. Color-visualization tools are no help. We hold up a Lilliputian fabric swatch and see mostly our big thumb. Paint color chips are so tiny they seem rescued from the bottom of a kaleidoscope. And they don't even match the color in the can.
As one interior designer lamented about some of his clients, "Being a colorist is like being a therapist. Your clients don't know what the problem is, but you have to tell them how to solve it."
Here it is, then, the first truism for getting color to work for you: You can sit through home improvement seminars until your legs go numb. Read the flood of decorating books and magazines until your eyes clamp down. Looky-loo your way through every model home on the market. But you will get it right only by trying. And failing. And trying again.
Find comfort in this: Even the pros, who know the color families better than their own, mess up. But they keep adding and subtracting until everything balances out — lights and darks, hards and softs.
There are different ways to do this. Carl Tillmanns is a house-painting contractor and color designer who has hued up Tom Hanks' beach cottage, Barbra Streisand's storybook-style estate and Jerry Seinfeld's ultramodern mountain retreat. Tillmanns likes color and pours it on walls with a skilled eye and hand.
Jeffrey Alan Marks, on the other hand, is an interior designer who dispenses color as if through an eyedropper. He'll design a monochromatic room and add a jolt of color such as a canary-yellow chair.
Both live in graceful Los Angeles homes enhanced by their choices.
Tillmanns' Mission-style two-story near Farmers Market is his lab. "I learn through time, experience and trial and error," he says. "Each room is a process. You build on it."
When he and his wife, TV director and screenwriter Rachel Feldman, and their two children, Nora and Leon, moved into their house eight years ago, they didn't want furniture or artwork to have visual punch. Instead, the walls became the focus.
Slowly, layer by layer, Tillmanns found the way to make the once-neglected rooms grand with a montage of colors and faux finishes. Cheesecloth-applied glaze added texture and depth, and he put brown and purple deck paint on the resin entry floor and stair risers to simulate tile.
In other rooms, Tillmanns pulled up the orange shag carpet to reveal oak floors. Planks in the dining room lay on a diagonal, a geometry that inspired him to create a diamond pattern on the walls using a dozen colors from the other rooms' leftover paints. The soffit ceiling is a confetti of bronze, copper and gold leaf.
The large living room has been visually divided into an office, sitting and music areas. Tillmanns wanted the sitting area to be the highlight of the room, so he painted the fireplace surround and mantel the same colors as the velour sofa — cerise and black.
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