Recently, I was called for a consultation at a wonderful old craftsman home.  The dark-stained oak woodwork and floors were marvellous to behold.  The simple architecture and the colours of nature that bound this favoured building style were indicative of the Arts and Crafts movement in North America during the early 20^th century.  The recent homeowner had already lighted the sombre wood banding (all that wood that breaks up and layers the walls and ceiling in a craftsman house) of the living room and dining room with vanilla gradually muting through the layers to a pure white ceiling (not my favourite).  After a tour of the rest of the home, where the architectural additions and decorating schemes diverged from the original craftsman aesthetic, we set to work on blending the rigorous style of the past with a 21^st century Nova Scotian ambiance. 

The object of this consultation was to find a way to “brighten the room”.  Well, with paint tones already sliding from vanilla to white, “bright” was already evident in the background of the walls.  However, as I surveyed the room, the “brightness” that captured your eye derived from the lone colourful painting set low within one of the banded wall spaces.  “There’s your brightness!”  For all the light-to-white paint trying to contrast the dark wood, it was a small colour-saturated painting by the homeowner that guided the rooms’ direction.  The jewel tones in the painting lost their lustre against the vanilla walls.  What was needed was a wall colour that allowed the painting to sparkle.    

Traditionally, the craftsman house used muted earth tones to signify a connection to nature.  The greens were obviously leaves and grass.  The browns and greys were tree trunks and soil. Oranges and beige tints were clay.   The fall tones of purple (burgundy to plum) red, orange, and yellow (from amber to gold) usually dominated representing the seasonal foliage and flowers, while small bursts of spring tones for that season’s flowers were allowed to highlight.  We took a look at the setting, and then considered all of the other dominant colours in the home.  We settled on Benjamin Moore’s silken pine (2144-50) and soft fern (2144-40), contemporary muted colours of soft green that represent the tones within our own South Shore forest.   In the living room, the wall spaces up to the 8-foot level of banding would be silken pine.  The last foot of wall space and the ceiling spaces would be soft fern.  The idea was to create a canopy of soft green much like the canopy of trees that enveloped the house.  The dining room would be all silken pine, due to the irregularity of the banding around the wall protrusion formed by the staircase.  With the soothing green between the dark stained oak banding, the rooms would appear visually calm, allowing the eyes to settle on the brilliant tones of the artwork around the room.  With this one decision we were able to see the rooms in a new art-oriented light.  And the fun of rearranging all of the walls began…