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When you move into a new place it’s important to take the time to make it feel like your home. If you have the luxury of time, doing home improvement before you move in is the perfect moment to customize your place. Paintworks and Decorating helped these new homeowner’s personalize their new Manhattan home by painting with a splash of color. The new color looks great against the Decorator’s White trim and ceiling. A little contrast goes a long way.
From the color of your car, your linens and your favorite sweater to the color of neon lights, dishes, socks, paint and product packaging, there's a concerted effort to attract your attention with color. Without reading the company name, most folks can accurately identify, just from the color, a UPS or FedEx truck, can of Coca-Cola or Tiffany's box. The latter has its own trademarked robin's egg shade of blue.
Color is a powerful branding mechanism, as well as a delight to the eye in the natural world, our homes and work spaces. Colors promote emotional characteristics and perceived space. If you look around the Internet long enough, you can find almost every color is trending somewhere. The challenges are (1) to choose colors which enhance your home, personality and lifestyle, and (2) engage the best professional painters to transform a room or entire home into your own special retreat. The second decision is the easy one: Paintworks & Decorating.
Paint companies and fashion designers often drive color trends. Benjamin Moore has selected as its Color of the Year for 2019 a chic pewter gray named Metropolitan AF-690. Ellen O'Neill, director of strategic design intelligence, describes it as "comforting, composed and effortlessly sophisticated ... exuding beauty and balance. It's a color in the neutral spectrum that references a contemplative state of mind and design." The advantage of a gray tone is the opportunity to add vibrant colors in furniture, accents, art and fabric.
A warm dark colonial blue dubbed Blueprint S470-5 is Behr's 2019 Color of the Year, and they call it an "honest, approachable color that conjures up the blueprints builders rely on to bring architectural designs to life." Blue in any shade can evoke the peace and serenity found in landscapes and water views.
PPG Paints claims for 2019 that "classic luxury meets the restorative power of nature in this trending deep green paint color" named Night Watch. “The restorative power of nature is important in society now more than ever,” explains Dee Schlotter, PPG senior color marketing manager. "Night Watch is about bringing the healing power from the outdoors into your home." Memories of a walk in the park, like Central Park or Pelham Bay Park, can occupy a permanent space in your home.
A creamy terra cotta color from the American Southwest has migrated into the Big Apple and takes center stage as Sherwin-Williams' 2019 Color of the Year: Canyon Clay. It can go in a contemporary, neutral, natural or splashy direction in a high-rise loft, Upper East Side condo or Brooklyn brownstone.
Others in the color industry like Valspar and Pantone release palettes of colors they see as both trending and complementary. These run the gamut of the off-white creams and ubiquitous and optimistic yellows to natural greens and browns, soothing teal and blues, dramatic purples and energizing reds and oranges.
Color is a matter of personal preference, and the good news is that you don't need to be limited. Accent walls and contrasting trim are wildly popular, and while sky blue color was once relegated to porch ceilings, colors have found their way inside to add an element of interest and/or expand the space. Painting a wall to within two feet of a light colored ceiling and adding a thin strip of wood trim, for example, can make a small room seem larger. Light colors in general expand a space, while dark colors increase coziness. Another tip is to choose a paint color one or two shades lighter than you fall in love with on the paint chip.
After surfing the web at Houzz, Pinterest, hgtv.com and other sites, make your color selections and connect with Paintworks for the most professional application using the best practices and tools in the industry. We live up to our slogan: "Painting is our passion - Making people happy is our mission.”
One of the most stunning upgrades to a kitchen, without gutting it and spending the same as a new BMW 5-Series, is refinishing the cabinets. It can take mediocre to amazing with Paintworks & Decorating at the helm. This locally-owned, Big Apple-based company arrived at one Upper East Side Manhattan residence wearing their best paint pants with hand tools, power tools, masking tape and sheets of plastic, sandpaper and a sufficient supply of high quality Sherwin-Williams lacquer to get the job done.
This project entailed removing 45 cabinet doors and drawer fronts, which were sprayed off-site in a multiple-step process. The kitchen appliances, floors and countertops were meticulously protected by masking in plastic. Paintworks & Decorating is intimately familiar with everything connected to paint, stain and lacquer, and for this job, sanding, spraying, curing to a hard finish and repeating twice is standard operating procedure.
The lacquer dries to a hard finish which is incredibly smooth for the sophisticated process of diligently and evenly spraying, letting dry, then sanding appropriately, three times, for the sleek exterior [matte or glossy] that elevates the dull kitchen to a delightful, dynamic space -- after, of course, they carted all 45 doors and the drawer fronts back and perfectly re-installed them.
Stepping out, being bold and taking a risk can be applied to homeownership as well as interior colors. Buying property is adulting at its peak, making a serious investment and becoming an integral community member. Color is one of the most powerful tools in the homeowner's toolbox without a cord or battery pack. It can create mood, enlarge or shrink the perception of space and stimulate the senses.
New homeowners in Manhattan's Upper East Side recently contracted with locally-owned Paintworks & Decorating to color their new crib. One room especially evokes an eyebrow-lifting wow factor for its monochromatic blue theme. The walls, trim and doors are all smoothly coated with a brave medium dusky blue that tinges the horizon just before sunrise or sunset begins to glow. The space evokes the warmth of your favorite blue jeans coupled with a sense of adventure like riding waves at Rockaway Beach or bouldering in Central Park.
As daylight changes, lighting alters color, and what looks one way under fluorescent lighting can appear darker, lighter or more yellow or red near large windows. The experienced home painters at Paintworks & Decorating are experts with paint and coloring, having long ago traded in crayons for brushes and paint rollers.
After
Before
Rather than remove this built in shelving unit, the new homeowner opted to fix the holes and repaint the whole thing in colors that fit them. They chose a vibrant color that makes the cabinets feel new and unique. Painting everything else with fresh white completed the transformation. 2 coats of Benjamin Moore Cabinet coat with sanding in between the coats allowed the paint to go on smooth and bond properly. Love painting cabinets all over Brooklyn and NYC.
