3 Ways to Use Fresh to Sell Design

Hi everyone, I want to share a little tip about what your clients are really looking for (even though they might not even know it yet).

Occasionally I receive comments or emails like this:

“We aren’t ALL interested in introducing fresh into our homes, Maria!”

“Please don’t exclude those of us who still prefer warm, earthy colours.”

 “Puh-leese, write some posts on what to do with all the orangey/yellow wood trim I deal with in my area!”

“My clients aren’t interested in gray.”

“You couldn’t pay me to use grays in my home. Ever.”

Even if it doesn’t look like it, these comments/questions all have one thing in common — they don’t yet understand the concept of “fresh.”

In my Specify Colour with Confidence™courses recently I’ve been talking with my students about the idea of fresh for their clients. It’s been such an important conversation I thought I’d share it with you.

And, even though I wrote about fresh in a previous post last February, I think I need to spend a little more time on it.

I CANNOT, I repeat, CANNOT remember the last time a reader or a client said:

          “I loooooooove earth tones! Help me choose some earth tones, Maria.”

Just to be clear, I am not trying to sell you on the idea that you suddenly need to embrace gray and introduce it into your house from top to bottom. Actually, you don’t even need to have any in your house to create a feeling of fresh.

When I’m discussing finishes for a new build with one of my clients, the first thing we do is establish their foundation palette — will it be white (to go with grays) or will it be cream (to go with beiges)? And probably fully 30% of my clients prefer cream over white.

Anyway, back to fresh.

If you’re a designer and you can’t specify gray to save your soul, the reason is probably one of two things:

Small town {Italy}

1. The Parisian Gray Trend has not hit your town yet.

If you’re in the midwest, or you live in the country, away from a metropolitan area, this will be the case. Here on the west coast the gray trend arrived almost five years ago, but where I live (almost 1 1/2 hours from downtown Vancouver) most kitchens are still brown.

One of my sisters lives in the country near me and she’s looking for a new house. During her house-shopping jaunts, most of the kitchens she’s seen have wood-stained cabinets in some version of brown. In my experience that’s because most builders are men and their perception is that a wood-stained kitchen is more valuable than a white kitchen.

What these builders don’t understand is that it’s the wife who most often chooses the kitchen where she’ll spend most of her time. Not the wood-stained-loving man. It’s obvious by all the attention given by design magazines to white kitchens that this is a look women love and want.

Brown trend kitchens with wood-stained cabinets belong with all things cream, beige and earthy. They don’t belong with whites, grays and black.

And until the gray trend does hit your town, it’s harder to get excited or to help your clients get excited. It’s often not until we see a new trend with all its possibilities that we wake up to how to create the look for ourselves.

On the other side of this coin — for those of you who are right on top of the pulse of where colour trends are and are now starting to think gray is OUT, OUT, OUT, relax. Lighting manufacturers (for example) have only just starting making trendy lighting that goes with the gray trend, ergo all the gold and copper that’s suddenly right on trend and here to warm up gray.

Just two short years ago when I was looking for new lighting for my house, most of it was still oil-rubbed bronze.  Residential colour trends can’t change that fast; manufacturers would go out of business if the trendy neutral of the decade officially changed every five years. Especially when it takes five years for most of the planet to catch on!

2. You still think gray is cold.

Your job as the designer/colour expert is to sell the right colour for your client’s home. I start Day 1 of my Specify Colour with Confidence™ True Colour Expert™ Academy talking about this.The right colour sometimes even trumps the colour a client thinks they need or want.

During Day 1 we talk about how to handle your client’s objections when they balk at the right colour you suggest. We talk about all kinds of colour myths, starting with the one that states that gray is cold. And not a single participant in my training walks out with the misconception that gray is cold by the time they complete the course.

In truth, gray can definitely be cold but it can also be warm.

If you choose all gray finishes for your renovation or new build, your house will for sure feel cold, certainly until you start decorating.

A client who calls you for a new colour scheme for their house right now — with everything they are seeing in magazines and online — whether they are consciously aware of this or not, they are looking to create a feeling of fresh.

And here’s what you need to get about that:

Irene’s incredibly lovely and sweet mom has a hunter green sofa, rose pink walls and carpeting, oak cabinets and furniture from the 80s. She LOVES her hunter green sofa. She has no idea that her living room should ever look any different. All her furniture is in good repair so it would never occur to her that she should even call her designer daughter over to help update her cosy home. Or, if she didn’t have a designer daughter, it wouldn’t occur to her to call a designer to change a single thing.

So, if you have a client who is paying you to update their home, it’s because they want something new.

So here’s the new. Get ready, because it’s called FRESH.

Here’s what introducing FRESH to your designer bag of tricks looks like:

Light, Pale Colours

Recently, I helped my sister Anita with a makeover in her living room (above). Go here to see photos of her room before the makeover.

You’ll notice, when you look at her living room, THAT THERE ISN’T A SINGLE STITCH OF GRAY IN SIGHT. She even broke the cardinal rule of mixing pink-beige and yellow but miraculously, with some edited shopping and styling, we still made it work.

Introducing Cream or White

She had bought two mismatched cream, faux leather chairs on her own (without consulting me). One had nail heads, one did not. They were placeholders purchased from a big box store until she figured out which chairs were right for her living room.

We made them work too.

Because they were cream.

Introducing cream or white to any interior through pillows, chairs, accessories and lamps will go a long way to adding a feeling of fresh to the space.

Notice that there’s just enough pink-beige in the larger-scale damask pillows (with cream) on her sofa as well as the candleholders on the mantle.

In addition, all her lamp shades are off-white. A lamp shade is, by the way, NOT the place to introduce colour or pattern.

Current Pattern

The large-scale damask on the creamy brown and blue pillow as well as the Moroccan pattern on her drapery are all new and current patterns.

All we need in here is a chevron pattern to make it really trendy. Have you noticed you can’t throw a stone these days without hitting something in a chevron pattern ; ) ; ). Hey, nothing wrong with chevron!

Here’s what I want you to learn. There is no gray or white or black in this interior and yet I would call this living room current, fresh and trendy. Trendy in the best possible sense of the word.

If you have a client who is paying you for a full service design or simply a consultation to give them ideas they can implement on their own, they are looking for F R E S H.

Will the pendulum swing back to dark and dramatic eventually?

Sure.

But right now, your clients are paying you for fresh and it’s up to you to deliver that.

And if you’re not a design professional, the same lesson applies to you! You might not have been aware that fresh was what you were looking for but how can it not be, when everywhere you look, that’s what you see?

If you’re not looking for a fresh look and feel, perhaps you’ve just finished a renovation or a new build and it’s earthy! So enjoy it and don’t worry about the trends. Trends, schmends.

I’m talking to those of you who have had the same living room for over 10 years. Maybe you’ve tried introducing new colours and it’s not working. This might be the reason.

Or not.

Maybe you’re someone like Irene’s Mom (or mine for that matter) who’s blissfully happy with what they have.

And that’s a good thing.

There’s more important things in the world to stress about than whether your home happens to be totally current or not.

Related posts:

 10 Ways to Get a Fresh Look with a Black Sofa

How to Inject Fresh into Your Earth-Toned House

The Difference Between Fresh Greens and Yellow Greens

If you would like your home to fill you with happiness when you walk in the door, become a client. Online or In-person.

To get your exterior colours right, download my How to Choose Exterior Colours with Confidence webinar and get my go-to list of colours.

Download my eBook, How to Choose Paint Colours – It’s All in the Undertones to get my complete step-by-step system on how to get colour to do what you want.

To make sure the undertones in your home are right, get some large colour boards!

And, if you would like to learn how to choose colour with confidence, become a True Colour Expert ™