genevieve.malarkey What comes to mind when you hear “Parisian Grey?” For me it is the grey clouds that hang over the city on most days of the year; the mercurial sky casting a grey hue to all the beautiful buildings and sidewalks below. I’m well acquainted with this hue, being from the Seattle area and living with very Parisian-like weather most of my life. Maybe for you the term evokes images of elegantly painted furniture adorning most chateaux. Or maybe you think of it as the modern, trend setting color for interiors, and therefore it is only logical it came from Paris. A fair assumption, bien sûr.
In any case, unless you’ve been living under a rock (and not a grey one), you probably already know that the go-to neutral tone for the last decade or so is grey. The days of beige, grey’s predecessor, are behind most of us, thank goodness. Grey is a clean, bright, uplifting tone that also happens to go with absolutely everything. While beige is indeed another neutral that pairs with most colors, it does not give that modern, clean, bright feeling one gets from grey. Which leads me to another question: have you ever tried to pick a color of gray out of a stack of paint cards? Quelle horreur.
Here’s a sad story for you- before the hurricane gutted our home, my husband had spent the better part of a year painting every wall in our house. When we bought it, it was beige. And while I originally planned to live with it, it soon became apparent that it was not tolerable for me nor my aesthetic sensibilities. So my wonderful hubby began painting our 2300 square foot home (I stayed away from the fumes as I was pregnant at the time), and when he was down to the very last wall, BOOM. Hurricane. Everything had to be torn out. I think that might be the worst sting of the entire event, to be honest.
Fast forward to the happy time when we were needing to pick our new paint color for our new walls (which would be painted by professionals this time). Obviously I knew I was going to use grey, but now that I had a second opportunity to choose a shade of grey, I had decided that the one we previously chose was too blue. I have a lot of blue accents in my home, so the blue undertones in the previous grey kind of made everything in the rooms meld together, instead of stand apart. I realized I needed a very clean, true gray with no color undertones to achieve that light and airy look I was going for. I didn’t want the wall colors to pull any direction other than grey, and while that seems like a simple request, it is so difficult to find. Almost every grey out there pulls blue, or green, or even sometimes yellow. And the ones that look “true” grey are often the color of cement. Not exactly a peaceful shade.
Another problem I was trying to overcome was the darkness of my living room. While it is an open floor plan, the living room is in the middle of the house, and can be a bit dark in the middle of the day. So I knew I needed to brighten up the space with a light enough grey to achieve this effect (thus, the cement shade was out of the question). This led me to some lengthy online research, where I stumbled on an intriguing concept for choosing your perfect grey (or any color for that matter). And unless you are already an interior designer, this might be new information for you too.
If you flip over any paint sample card from your paint store, you will see the acronym LRV with a number next to it. This stands for Light Reflective Value, or the amount of visible light that reflects from a paint’s surface. The number is a percentage ranging from 0 (no light reflection: black) to 100 (total light reflection: bright white). So, logically, a higher number next to the LRV means that you will have more light reflection from your wall color, which is ideal if you have a darker space or are trying to achieve a very light pallet, like me. Anything with a LRV over 70 is considered excellent light reflection. It can also help the efficiency of your home in that you will not need to use so many lights throughout the day if you have walls with a high enough LRV.
Armed with this info, I went to the paint store and grabbed all the sample cards of greys that seemed to have the shade I was going for: not pulling toward any color other than true grey, and has a high LRV. I brought them home and taped them up on the wall in different places around the house- this is very important so that you can see the color from different slices of light and shade from all directions. I recommend buying a small sample can and painting small spots of the same shade around the house for this reason, but as we couldn’t do that in the rental we were in, I taped the cards up instead. After quickly rejecting several shades that clearly pulled toward a different color (which becomes very noticeable when you begin to compare them next to each other), I narrowed it down to a few shades, and after agonizing over a final decision, we settled on Rhinestone by Sherwin Williams (SW7656), with an LRV of 74. I also Googled images of this shade to see it in different homes for an idea of how it looked in a furnished space, and was very pleased by what I saw.
Once it was up on the walls, I knew I had hit the jackpot. This grey is so light it is almost white, but obviously isn’t as it contrasts just enough with the white moldings. It is a true grey in that it does not pull blue, or yellow, or green, or whatever. It is soft, almost velvety, and does an amazing job brightening up my living room. Many of my neighbors, who also have remodeled their homes in the last year thanks to Hurricane Michael, even used the same hue after seeing the result in my home (*humble brag*). And in terms of efficiency, I have found that I almost never turn the lights on in my bedroom, and I am able to keep the lights off in the main living part of the house until almost mid day, when before I had to turn them on first thing in the morning. Win-win.
So, next time you are on the hunt for a paint color, you may want to consider the LRV factor, both for brightness and efficiency sake. If you are looking for a perfect grey, I highly recommend Rhinestone, but there are many more beautiful greys out there to consider. Decide what kind of look you are going for, think about the hues you want within your paint color, and check out the LRV factor. I have painted many, many rooms in my life, and this by far is my favorite choice thus far.
And, bon courage. Painting is kind of a bitch and I hope to not have to do it for a very long time.
