GOODBYE, GRAY

The other day a woman stopped by to check out our gray walls. She's tired of the look of her living room and when she told her daughter she was thinking of going gray, the daughter suggested a trip down to Grand Avenue to see our "absolutely perfect gray". Why, thank you. Except that when the woman walked in, I was up on a ladder, painting over the very color she had come to see. "But why?" she asked. "I thought gray was getting to be pretty popular!"  Exactly.

When Debra hired me back in 2010, our walls were painted Sheetrock White. OK, that wasn't the actual color actual name, just what it looked like on the walls: nothing. All the cool pieces that Debra had found were dying against the bland background, so my first order of business was to change that background. I went with dark gray instead. Much better.

Actually, the "new" paint color was a fairly easy choice:  I just re-used the same shade  of gray that I had used thirty-five years before, when I moved into my very first post-college apartment. 

One of the reasons I took the apartment in the first place was that, although the place was dirty, it still had its original glass block walls, terrazzo floors and twelve-foot-wide enameled steel Venetian blinds. I couldn't have afforded to replace the blinds--even if I wanted to, which I didn't--so I had their glossy gray finish custom-matched by Elmer, the old guy at my neighborhood Benjamin Moore store. There's a hard way to do things and an easy way. I chose the easy way: I let Elmer do it.  

The building had been a tony address when it was new in 1940, and its apartments' spacious dimensions turned out to be a drawback. What little furniture I owned looked totally lost in the big rooms, so I used paint & dim light to create the illusion of warmth & intimacy where there was neither.  Dark gray & I go way back.

And although my handsome gray walls matched the blinds, they somehow had a depth & liveliness that the blinds didn't have. Of course, in the dark ages before HGTV turned everyone into a design authority, nobody ever had heard of full-spectrum paint, but that's probably what I got from Elmer, who matched anything you gave him  

and he did it all by eye, not by pushing a button on a digital scanner. Nowadays, guys like Elmer are a vanishing species.  

I stuck with the gray, even after the place started filling up with antique furniture, and when I moved to my next place--the upstairs of a big Victorian house--I painted my bedroom the same gray as that first apartment. Why mess with success?

And ten years later, when I moved to an apartment in Chicago--a 1950 high-rise overlooking Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan--I went all-gray again.  This time I matched the steely color of the lake in winter. So I have no problem with gray.

  

So why, then--my visitor to the shop wanted to know--if I liked the color, and it looked good in the shop, was  I getting rid of it?  I couldn't argue with her about its looking good in the shop. It did look good. Really good. But here's the thing:  

six weeks after I painted the shop gray, a mass-market store lately known for its overscaled furniture and its equally overscaled catalogs painted their store what's basically the same color, so, after people started asking me "Is this Restoration Hardware 'Slate'?"--and it's not, but there's no point being coy or making people guess--I started giving out hand-painted samples of our color. That way, those who liked it could take it to their own paint store and have it matched. After all, there's more to being a merchant than just selling stuff. A hundred-odd years ago, Marshall Field started serving home-made chicken pot pies to lady customers faint with hunger after a morning of hard shopping. I'm no cook, so I'm not about to  do that, but I can paint and hand out paint samples. Whatever it takes.

These days, of course, that's hardly even necessary, because dark gray walls are everywhere you look. And while, in principle, I have no problem with copying--either my own, or others'--I hate it when new customers think that I've copied the shop right across the street--or the one two doors east of us. I sure hope my color sources aren't that obvious. Fortunately, inspiration is all around us.

 Anyway, since, after a few years, I've become bored with this no-color palette- (which, if I get to missing it, I can still see, simply by looking in the gutter out front)

 we'll be going--finally, after a year of talking about it--in a fresh, new direction. 

I'm not saying where or when I came up with the idea for this particular color, 

Green River by artist Stacy Bogan.  

but if you were in Chicago last weekend, you might have an idea.