So you want to paint a room white. Sounds easy, until you go to the paint shop and discover there are dozens of whites to choose from.

Many have poetic names - cream, pearl, vanilla, snow, chalk, ivory, jasmine, bone... But the closer you look, the more confusing the choices are. You want a plain, basic white, but the purest white on the colour chart looks a little harsh next to all those shades with just a hint of something else - beige, grey, peach, rose, yellow or the palest-ever blue or green.

Often people default to white because they don't want strong colours in their home. But according to Sharon Grech, a US colour design expert at Benjamin Moore Paints, "it's harder to choose white than any other colour".

Benjamin Moore has more than 150 whites and, Grech says: "When people are choosing white, I see more people unhappy or making a mistake or being shocked at the colour than when they choose other colours."


Whites are strongly influenced by colours around them, so Grech says it's crucial to try a sample to see how it looks in the room. Buy a pint and paint a opne-square-metre board that you can move around your home. "Sometimes the sun hits it one way or another at different times of day, or it looks different against the rug, or you realise it's got a lot of pink in it or green in it," she says. "It might look totally different in the morning than at night."

The paint sheen makes a difference, too. One recommended mix is a semi-gloss trim with matte on the walls.

And don't forget the ceiling, which is increasingly seen as "a fifth wall", Grech says.



James Martin is an architectural colour consultant whose company, the Color People, designs colours for buildings.

"If you're going to have white, you want to use a warm white - yellow white, peachy white, rosy white," he says.

"Anything you live with, you want it to be warm."


He adds: "White kills art. When you put a piece of art against a white wall, it isolates the painting so it becomes like a postage stamp - a thing in a box. If you put the same painting against a coloured wall, it eliminates those boundaries, pulls the colours out of the painting, and brings the painting to life."

Martin doesn't like white walls, but will use off-white in a ceiling. He cautions that bright white trim and a bright white ceiling will make other colours look brighter than they would if you were using an off-white.

What can work "if you really like white", he says, is to choose a warm white for walls in a flat sheen, then a high-gloss trim the same colour: "It's a very sexy, subtle thing to do."

Martin advises against choosing colours online, because they can be distorted. But there is an art to studying the paper fan deck of paint colours in the store. Bring a white piece of paper with a square cut out so you can focus on the colour you're considering.

And if you're colour-challenged and unsure whether the white you're eyeing is more on the rosy side or the orange side, follow it in the fan deck from its palest iteration to its deepest, to see its true undertone. Warm tints include red, orange, yellow, and offshoots such as peach and apricot, but if you want to cool a room off, go for blue or purple. In between are the neutrals - taupe, grey, beige.

Don't get overwrought about the choices.

"I think most people have more judgment than they think they do," Eiseman says. "You look at something, you have a doubt about it because your eye is telling you something is off here. Or you look at it and it pleases you. In the end, it's your eye and your comfort level."

By Beth J. Harpaz