Color Design Consulting

Color design consulting is a service Painting in Partnership, from the Chicago area, offers its clients in order to help relieve the stress of choosing paint colors for their house-painting project. Over the years, we have found that the results of such a paint color consultation can be greatly enhanced by asking our clients to do a little bit of homework ahead of the consultation. Let’s see what it entails.

First, we ask that you create a folder of pictures from magazines and the web, as well as color swatches. It is important that you select pictures and colors that you both like and dislike. Creating this folder will help you define your personal style.

Second, on a scale of 1 to 10, “take the temperature” of each room in your house, in terms of what works or does not work for you, 10 being a room that totally works.

The third step consists of taking an “Emotional Inventory”: how do you feel in each room? In coming up with your assessment, consider the following four factors:
- Function: What is the room used for? Does it serve its function well?
- Who uses the room: Are there special needs at play?
- Mood: What feeling, emotion or mood do you want to convey in the room?
- Change: Is anything going to change? Answering that question now will help you choose colors more appropriately.

As a final step, we ask that you reassess the pictures in your folder using the information you have now gathered on your space. What is it that you like the most in those pictures?

Client's Paint Color Experimentation

You are now ready to focus on colors! This is the part that many people struggle with, as shown in this picture. The color selection process can be an extremely stressful experience, but it does not have to be. On their own, many people will make very “safe” and conservative color choices, for fear of “making a mistake”. This is where a professional color design consultation can be most helpful.

At Painting in Partnership, we have found that doing the homework described above really helps clients in making color decisions that really work for them. Helping you create an environment that is nurturing to you is the result we strive to achieve with every client.

Paint restoration sometimes involves the replacement of rotten wood before any painting can be done. As shown on the picture below, the front porch had deteriorated very substantially. The owners agreed to take that opportunity and redesign the porch to make it more consistent with the period of the house.

Before Period Color Consultation

Most of the floor support beams were preserved, along with two third of the floor boards. The rest had to be replaced. When we work on a vintage house, every effort is made to preserve as much of the original materials as we can. Pressure-treated wood, along with cedar, was used in re-building the porch.

Painting in Partnership’s paint color consultation service also played a key role on this project. The owners love color! We recently painted the interior of their house in vivid “period” colors. The front porch and façade of the house had to make a similar statement to what they had made with their interior house painting project. The result was a beautiful five-color porch!

After Painting Restoration

We used dark purple on the porch floor and the shingles on the porch gable. The shutters were also repainted in the same purple color. We stained the shingles on the porch surround a rusty red color to create balance with the rusty color roof. We used two shades of green for the front door and other porch elements. Finally, the spindles were painted the same color as the siding.

At Painting in Partnership, we believe that a little color can go a long way to create excitement for house painting project and the people involved.

Interior painting, combined with Color Consultation, create much added value for customers. We recently painted the interior of an American Four-Square style house. The owners expressed their desire for bold colors and a dramatic look.

The owners of this “period” house had given a lot of though to the colors they wanted. They also did quite a bit of research, but they were at a loss deciding which colors to choose for their interior painting project and how to use them throughout their house. This is the point at which color consultation was introduced into this house painting project. Let’s use the living room, dining room and foyer as an example. Here is a picture of the foyer before the interior painting project started.

Before Interior Painting

After Color Consultation and House Painting

The owners used these words to describe the look they envisioned for their living room: “We want to suggest a 19th century upper class English drawing room, where one could read and smoke, while buried deep in a leather armchair, brandy snifter at hand”. Those words inspired the selection of the colors used in the living room, foyer and dining room. A dark blue was chosen for the living room. A deep red was selected for the foyer and a green for the dining room.

You may recall that the owners had expressed their desire for a dramatic look. The stairs in the foyer presented an opportunity to create that drama: every two steps were alternatively painted, using the same three colors as those three areas of the house. Here is a picture of the dramatic new look of their foyer and stairway.

Our customers were delighted with the results of their interior painting project. Such a project demonstrates the power of color in creating home environments that nurture and inspire the occupants of that house. This is the result Painting in Partnership delivers every time.