Neutral Zone

I love my daughter-in-law. She can be a lot of fun, has interest and insight into deep and thoughtful topics, gets excited about life, laughs easily, and most importantly, loves my son. When she invited Kim and I to go along with her and our son, Ben, next weekend to look at furniture for their new home I was thrilled. I won’t be offering any suggestions though. We share similar tastes in many things, but color isn’t one of them.

Realtors are fussy about color. Interior decorators can be too. They insist on neutrals in paint, carpet, furniture, and say to “accent” with color. Well, that sounds boring! I love color!   

Many years ago we built a house in Colorado and painted it a nice shade of green. It blended perfectly with the surrounding forest. The inside walls were white, not egg shell, just white, and the carpet was sea-foam green! It was gorgeous and complimented the green patina copper accents on the whitewashed cupboards, and terra cotta tile. When we went to sell it, the realtors hated that carpet and the white walls. Too much color in one, not enough in the other. That was long ago and the people who bought it from us have now sold it again, but not before they ripped out the carpet and replaced it with wood laminate, and painted the outside of the house a pleasant “neutral” gray.

The neighbors who live behind us have a yellow, orange, and green house. It may be a bit bright for most people’s tastes, but they have enough foliage planted around it to give it an attractive Key West flair that fits right into our Florida neighborhood.

I have an eclectic collection of furniture in my house. The kitchen table chairs are padded with fabric depicting green leaves and pink flamingos. There’s a living room chair with a tropical foliage and parrot print, and the couches are adorned with palm trees. A large picture of a giant sea turtle hangs on one wall, and a print of bamboo on another. You’ll find the walls are painted white, blue, sea green, and yellow. Not all in one room, of course, and I’m thinking peach might fit in nicely somewhere.

My clothes have gotten more colorful over the years too, with bright fuchsias, blues, greens, oranges, and purples, replacing of my old “go to” black and white. After all, my opinions on things aren’t neutral, why should my clothes be neutral either?

Bright colors make me happy all over. They dial up my mood, and in general make me feel like it’s springtime or summer, no matter what month of the year displays on the calendar. Of course, living in Florida helps with that too.

But, not everyone is me. Some people are attracted to more subdued colors, dark or light, but in the neutral zone. Perhaps they find those colors comfortable and peaceful, and that’s okay, because we’re all different. We need to be different. Too much of the same thing is tedious. So, I’ll support Rebecca in her quest for a neutral colored couch, but she shouldn’t be surprised if a cobalt blue pillow, with a bright yellow, red, and green parrot magically appears on it!