With the seemingly endless variety of color swatches, asking AD100 designers to pick just one go-to wall paint seems like a presumptuous request. And for some, it was. “It depends on the local light,” Ilse Crawford explains. Fellow honoree Miranda Brooks of Miranda Brooks Landscape Design concurs: “Different climates take different colors I can’t commit!”
Thankfully, other designers some 35 of them entertained the idea. A select few designers nominated rich, contemplative colors, but the final palette of never-fail pigments is largely neutral, ranging from white to brown to gray (and all the beiges and greiges that come between them). Find the designer-approved wall paint colors below.
When it comes to painting rooms, gray is red-hot.
Benjamin Moore carries over 150 shades of gray, and Sherwin-Williams says that of their top 50 colors for interiors, 30 are grays.
“The trend toward gray started in Scandinavia, became big in the U.S. around six years ago, and is still on the rise,” says Sue Wadden, director of color marketing at Sherwin-Williams.
Andrea Magno of Benjamin Moore says, “Gray is not going anywhere, and is still growing in popularity. It updates things instantly, and it’s evolving over time. And we’re seeing more gray cabinetry and more trim in gray now.”