Blue Room

Have you ever painted a room and almost immediately decided that you'd made a mistake in color selection? Yeah, that's me.

The first room we painted in this house was the formerly pink guest bedroom. I went with a gray-green that ended up being more green than gray, and is actually rather minty. It's okay, but I don't love it. Major improvement on the pink, though.

I also put this same color on the walls of our boring, formerly white guest bathroom. This, plus swapping out three unframed elliptical mirrors for one rectangular framed one, served as a bit of a facelift for said bathroom. Oh, and we added handles to the front of the cabinets, too. When finished, it looked more or less like this:

The photograph, alas, does not do justice to just how bright green this ended up being. When I commented as such to the saleswoman at my favorite paint shop, she knowingly said, "Ahh, yes. Hollingsworth Green can end up sort of looking rather hospital green." Which pretty much summed it up for me. I did not like it. My husband suggested that perhaps it would grow on me over time, but it did not. So I eventually (about two weeks ago) decided that the green really had to go.

But what to replace it with? I hit up my beloved paint store for some Farrow & Ball samples, and turned the bathroom wall into a patchwork of color:

Again, the lighting in the room doesn't translate well for the photos. Essentially it came down to a couple of colors: Calluna, a pretty greyish lavender, Dix Blue, a stronger blue with a hint of green, or Parma Grey, AKA my kitchen walls.

  

The digital swatches all look lovely, right? On the wall, it was a lot more complicated. Calluna is very pretty, but in a tiny room brightly lit with artificial light, it's extremely lavender, with very little grey. It's still pretty that way, but I know myself well enough that were it on every wall in the bathroom, I would find it overwhelming. I really liked the Dix Blue, but Nick thought it was a little too dark and intense.

So that left us with Parma Gray. I'm pretty sure Nick would be down for painting just about every room in the house this color because he really, really likes it. But he and I both agreed the swatch on the wall honestly looked good. As it conveniently happens, I had about two-thirds of a gallon of it left from painting the kitchen. So last Sunday I went for it, and the result is pretty excellent. I also swapped the Spanish prints in brown frames out for selections of black and white photos I took when we visited Martha's Vineyard last month. I like the look to bring out the gray tones on the wall. Plus, the hallway behind it is lined in black-framed, brightly colored photographs, so I wanted something a little different.

Funny enough, the photograph makes the walls look more gray and less blue than they actually all and it still looks good. I actually wish the room in person was a bit more gray, but I like it nonetheless.  It's just a nice color, and the bathroom now looks like it belongs to adults, and not little kids who went overboard with green paint. I am much happier.

Now if only I could pick a color to paint our bedroom...