Don't go up the wall: how to pick paint colours for your home

The Guardian

26-05-2025

'We offer 15,000 whites. Pick any three.'
I more often give this advice to female clients, since in 40 years restoring, colour-matching and consulting I've seen most domestic décor decisions made by women. Apart from any cultural aspect, studies of human biology suggest a reason: only one in 200 women is colour blind compared with one in 10 men (even more, I suspect, are partially afflicted). Tetrachromacy – the ability to see a far broader range of colours – is also only found in females.
This innate ability to define hues accurately doesn't stop some women favouring odd colour schemes, I've found. I once matched paint to a Melbourne Storm jersey – deep purple, black and bright yellow – for the house and fences of a rugby fan. She showed me the result. I hoped the neighbours liked it; I didn't. One like-minded young man had me turn the walls and ceiling of his boydoir vampire-violet to match the satin sheets on his circular bed. 'The ladies really go for it,' he later told me, proudly displaying the image of a claustrophobic bat cave, complete with bile-yellow lava lamps.
Of course, these clients are outliers. Most choose subtle hues and wall colours that better reflect light and visually enlarge spaces. But with so much choice, colour schemes can be complex. I've known some people who find choosing colours excruciating. This can include industry professionals.
I worked with one notoriously finicky decorator who insisted our restoration team match entire walls to one fingernail-size spot on an 18th-century table. It wasn't possible, and we told her so, but she insisted, and the result wasn't what she'd hoped for.
This pressure for perfection was evident when I prepared paint and offered advice for The Block contestants in 2023. The show revealed that taste, decorating talent and stamina are not equally distributed, and I often shared the stress, especially when asked to match a deep-green bathroom tile for a frantic participant. The tile's texture made our $12,000 German colour-matching device useless, so it was down to my eyes. I finally got it – but only after 11 steps, cautiously approaching the desired shade with tiny increments of valuable pigment to avoid overshooting and having to backtrack or, worse, producing a wasteful mis-tint.
My abilities meet their match when it comes to render. When restoring this widely used, problematic surface coating, I've found it's best not to touch-up but to re-paint entirely. Render's rough texture prevents accurate machine matching, and its micro shadowing means the identical colour from a flat surface won't appear the same. As for matching that Block favourite, Venetian plaster, which is variable in colour across broad areas due to its depth and transparency, forget about it. I was also forced to point out that matching from a phone image is never wise. When it comes to accuracy, digital still lags far behind reality.
To reduce the stress of TMC (too much choice) I recommend initially picking just three whites for walls. Most paint companies help by featuring a limited range of 'popular' whites, covering the three primary colours in the visible spectrum.
These 'whites' contain combinations of pigments leaning towards blue (cool), red (warm) or green (neutral). When choosing samples, it helps to keep a 'pure' vivid-white swatch as a reference, and fan your shortlisted colours out across one another to distinguish their slight differences.
If you prefer a particular colour, ask your decorator or paint mixer to identify the pigments in a formula, or even to combine them without a base to reveal the fundamental hue before it's 'whited' out.
Of course, décor colour is influenced by light, and today's LEDs offer more wavelength range than the warm white of superseded incandescent bulbs. So it's a good idea to test swatches or sample pots in natural and artificial light before deciding.
It's important outside too. I've seen many people unhappy with an exterior grey that turned a shade of puce in afternoon or morning sunlight. Unless you like puce – it originally emulated bloodstains from squashed bugs on French bedsheets – I recommend choosing a neutral, green-based grey. Like whites, most greys (which I find are the hardest colours to match) can be steered in the same three spectrum directions by different proportions of blue-based black, with red and yellow ochre.
One of my more unwelcome pieces of advice challenges expectant parents' 'nesting instinct' – the urge to redecorate before the big event. I discourage this for two reasons: it's stressful; and most paint is toxic. If I can't persuade the client to postpone the project, I recommend a low VOC product (never oil-based enamels), thoroughly ventilating, staying hydrated (paint's dryers and oxidants desiccate humans too), and using an activated carbon respirator – or just getting a non-pregnant partner or painter to do the job.
Though painting is painstaking and potentially hazardous work, there's a kind of meditative fun to be had colouring your world, experimenting with the endless permutations available and then beholding the results – fresh, clean, vibrant spaces that demonstrate your individuality and sense of good taste. Unless you choose puce, that is.