The reasons for colorless homes are various, I am certain, and include tentativeness about "clashing," or preconceived ideas of what is supposed to be elegant, or easy to live with, or "proper". Painting a wall vermilion is as daring as walking around topless, no? With color, please remember one rule: there are no rules. There is only what pleases you and gives you joy. I have seen even colors work together beautifully in a room, colors you'd think would be a cacaphonous scream of an eye offense instead can look absolutely breathtaking together. Diana ended up with a glass wall mural of her favorite image ("Fire Asters" from our Dreamscape Gallery) and she coordinated the image with a Tuscany Bistro Mirror which I designed using individual art pieces of similar hues, an Ornate Serving Tray with "Fire Asters" and various glass accent tiles and similarly colored art pieces such as glass tile keepsake boxes through her home. We used other pieces throughout the home including "Dawn Field", "Golden Ladies" and "Kyoto Autumn". At my urging, she also brought in vermilion, pale gold and deep pink throw pillows, and huge, vermilion pillar candles. Her home, she says, now looks joyous and alive and she can't even remember what it used to look like.

Color Trend Slaves™ (CTS)
Me? I love love love purples and greens together, although I certainly know that's not everyone's cuppa. From a color theory standpoint, they are the exact perfect color opposites, or "lovers", as Chagall would say; but the two colors together have only been recently deemed "acceptable" though they might never achieve the level of respectability other color combinations, like peach and hunter green, for example, have. Or the erst popular, albeit cliché, dove gray and mauve. A woman I know, one who annointed herself the last word in good taste, considers my personal favorite, and one very evident in my own home, purple and green, "too Mardi Gras," whatever that means. But then again, she's most assuredly a CTS, or Color Trend Slave™.

For those of you old enough to remember '70's decor, if you can call it that, those fearsome "earth tones" were "in." Everybody had mustard yellow refrigerators and avocado green stoves. We walked on "burnt orange" shag carpets and everything was in varying shades of boring ecrus and lackluster browns. But then, In the eighties, "hunter green" was suddenly hot, and everybody was buying rich hunter green couches and bed linens with matching towels. Some brave souls, like my friend in New York City, painted three walls of her bedroom pale apricot and the main wall (her bed wall) hunter green. It was fabulous, if eyebrow raising, for the time. But bucking the current color trends is always guaranteed to be immensely satisfying. Having been a "purple girl" since birth, the level of frustration of not being able to find things in purple has only recently abated, and even then not fully. White (or off-white) isn't purple's only friend, it has lots of friends: greens, blues, yellows, peaches, pinks. And *gasp*, sometimes even red (yes, you read that correctly) works wonderfully with purple, if the red is chosen carefully (I've found that orange reds tend to work better than blue reds, depending on the purple) and used cleverly.

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