gray forefront colors interior home painting

  • Is The Gray Color Trend Fading For Home Interiors?

    Since 2010, we have painted so many interior spaces in gray hues that I’ve lost count. Gray is still by far the go-to color for designers, realtors, businesses, property managers, and people who just want their interior or exterior residence fashionably updated. I don’t feel, based on experience and talking to industry professionals, that gray is going to go away anytime soon. Let me share with you some reasons why gray is a safe bet and a fashionable one to remain the top color choice of 2020.

    Gary Colors Accessorize Very Well

    Fabric, floorings, and furnishings can all be easily coordinated with a gray visual foundation such as walls. Let’s say your interior features walnut stained floors, brilliant white trim, and curtains and furniture fabrics that feature a gray/black character. The gray visual foundation color will effortlessly create a sleek and well-tailored look to the interior as a whole. Gray will further coordinate these competing features for pleasing visual balance. Gray can also tie together disparate colors such as beige, brown, yellow, gold taupe, and blue into harmonious balance of space, color, and arrangement. This is the main reason gray has been and continues to be such a well-favored color on the color palette. It works and plays well with almost any other color and flatters just about any architectural space.

    Gray Can Be A Background Color Or A Forefront Color

    The virtues of the right gray as a background color are enormous. As a background color, gray can accent flooring such as tile, wood, or carpet. Background gray can readily highlight particular custom features such as fireplaces, draperies, counter tops, and cabinets. And best yet, the right background gray can even present an interior’s architectural features to real advantages such as high walls, woodwork, and even open architecture plans where rooms flow one into the other. But choosing gray as a forefront color can present some fantastic visual pop and energize an interior’s architectural style.

    Recently, we painted a mid-century Ranch-style home that was looking dated and tired. The popcorn ceiling was a real eyesore to the Client, but removal of the popcorn and ceiling re-texturing just couldn’t fit into the budget. So, the Client and I painted the interior walls in a lighter mid-tone gray with darker complementary gray accent wall colors here and there throughout the interior.

    The gray colors selected for the walls gave this vintage interior a contemporary and well-tailored look and also imparted a very dignified feel though the interior. The fetching gray forefront colors also worked wonders by diverting visual attention away from the popcorn ceiling and onto the wall color and accent color. Some simple decorating flourishes completed the picture! This is another significant reason gray is such a popular and user-friendly choice of color: it allows you to customize your interior spaces to accentuate either a forefront or a background presentation of colors.

    Everybody’s Jumping On The Gray Color Bandwagon

    Our last
    three interiors where pretty good sized and all three of those interiors
    selected what color? Wait for it… gray!

    Interior #1 was a residence being listed for sale and all the walls were painted in Sherwin Williams Athena Benjamin Moore 858. The updated appointments such as wood floorings, new countertops, tile backsplash, bathroom tile, and bathroom pedestal sink were all selected as forefront features and the Agreeable Gray worked very well as a background color. The accent highlights were painted in Benjamin Moore Graystone 1475.

    Interior #2 was color selected by a designer who used one gray for the general wall color and a darker, complementary gray accent color. The general color was Sherwin Williams Modern Gray SW 7632 and the accent color was Sherwin Williams’ Perfect Greige SW 6073. The accent color contrasted beautifully with the general color and allowed highlight features such as arches, fireplace stone, and arching windows to visually pop.

    Interior #3 also featured Sherwin Williams Agreeable Gray SW 7029 and applied Sherwin Williams’ Mediterranean SW7617 as an accent color. This color combination was chosen to act as foreground colors creating a very striking color combination that neatly blended and complimented all the stained woodwork within the interior.

    The Color Gray Is Here to Stay If You Believe the Numbers

    I mentioned
    that our last three interior paint color schemes all featured gray. We are
    scheduled to start three more interior paint jobs in the coming days and each
    one is going to feature a gray color scheme. The largest project has also
    chosen complementary gray colors for accent walls and the bricks surrounding
    the fireplace.

    And here’s
    the statistic that I think really drives home the point: when I looked back
    over our many interior and exterior paint jobs completed in 2019, 70% were
    painted in a gray color scheme.

    I think the
    big takeaway from the numbers and the very strong preference among, designers,
    realtors, business, property managers, and people just like you, is that gray
    isn’t just here to stay, but gray is here to be the big time dominant color
    choice for many years to come.

    Check out
    Sherwin Williams’ 2020 Color Forecast for the hottest trends in paint color and
    you will see featured an array of gray colors, gray infused colors, and gray
    complementary colors.