As a colour designer, I see them all too often: houses that look decorated and welcoming in the main rooms, but awful in the places used "only" for family comings and goings. They remind me of hotels and condominium towers that use up their quotient of granite and marble in the lobby and forget the stairwells and parking garages.
Why, these spaces always make me wonder, are decorative niceties reserved for main rooms and guests and not for where we park the car, do the laundry or store our things?
Since colour comes virtually free with paint, there is no reason why even the most "unimportant" of places can't be made to feel special.
Perhaps we need to follow the example of the Swiss embassy in London, where a recent much-publicized party revealed a secret that its staff had enjoyed privately for years - its underground parking garage is not a dull white wasteland but a place full of colour and commentary.
In 2001, then-ambassador Bruno Spinner had invited local graffiti artists to create what was supposed to be a temporary installation, but it proved too irresistible to whitewash.
In the home, areas such as storage rooms, basement stairwells and garage interiors are great places for cut-loose colours or our own personal graffiti.
Backdoor areas that kids of all ages stomp through, for instance, may not be ideal for hanging art, but at least one wall could sport a happy colour.
When a client once told me that her kids never liked to use their basement playroom, I took one look at the dingy white stairway and knew why. After the ceiling and one of its walls were painted red and the other wall was painted pink, the playroom suddenly became more popular.
No place is too small to be made enjoyable. In narrow back halls, the walls or ceiling can be dressed in any colour that feels good or in black with crisp white trim to overcome the neglected appearance of default white.
Toronto interior decorator Roz Kavander (http://www.roomworks.ca) encourages her clients to go mad in closets with surprising colours or wallpapers.
"There is so much fun," she says, "in having people walk into a safely decorated home and getting a surprise when they open the front hall closet and see the owner's alter ego, their funny or surprising side. It always gets the conversation going."
For a little girl who badly wanted a pink room but whose mother preferred a soft turquoise on the walls, I used Barbie-doll pink inside the bedroom closets.
When the closet doors were open, the girl got lots of "her" pink. When they were closed, they hid her colour surprise.
"In large walk-in closets," American designer Eck Follen says, "I often paint the ceilings red ... just a private little touch. Clients who are afraid of too much strong colour say this makes them feel bold."
In the case of a colour-loving client whose husband leaned to a more neutral palette, the laundry room was the place for satiating her chromatic cravings. Instead of a white that would have looked dull in the windowless room, I suggested a pale yellow on the ceiling, two other yellows (Ciara Yellow and Hound Lemon by Farrow & Ball) on three walls and red (F & B's Blazer) on the fourth.
Because small powder rooms have no particular colour demands, they, too, offer an opportunity for a playful pushing of limits. Ceilings, though, should be done in the same colour or a lively contrast. A glossy finish will make the room seem bigger.
Back at the Swiss embassy in London, one of the contributing artists, Banksy, has become so famous in the seven years since the graffiti installation was created that his part of it (which includes 21 profiles of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sporting a Mohawk and a Mona Lisa with a rifle range stencilled on her forehead) is estimated to be worth £1-million.
Which is, no doubt, a lot more valuable than all of the granite, marble and embellishments in the embassy's front hall put together.
Janice Lindsay is a Toronto colour and design consultant.
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