Paint laboratory - techniques for use of paint in interior decoration - Brief Article

Sunset, March, 2001 by Peter O. Whiteley

Every room in the Davises' Los Angeles home glows with new hues and subtle textures

* For Southern California designer-builder Jim Davis, home is where the experiments are. His field of research is paint color. The walls, floors, cabinets, and wood trim in his 1941 ranch house demonstrate that color can function in two ways: as a stylish interior decorator, by adding a patina of age or a contemporary accent, and as a cost-conscious remodeler, by expanding or shrinking a room without moving walls.

For Davis, color is more than the use of solid tones: It's about achieving texture, depth, and subtle shadings. His home was once the proverbial blank canvas, with every room painted white. He transformed the interior with six different kinds of paint and three integrally colored plasters. (He also painted the exterior walls and trim with two more kinds of paint.) "It was like going from a black-and-white to a color television," Davis says.

He started cautiously, warming the family room, dining room, and living room with soft hues and finishes. The family room pairs milk-painted and beeswaxed wainscoting below with a chalk-base distemper paint above. (Distemper paint contains earth pigments, calcium carbonate, tinting colors, and casein mixed with water.) The dining room has a lightly stained floor with a painted "rug," two tones of mint green distemper paint (with lime paste added for mottling) on the walls and ceiling, and a low-sheen white paint on the wood trim. Living-room walls are coated with a khaki-colored lime-base paint that has subtle tone variations. The color accentuates the newly raised ceiling with its handsome series of exposed 6-by-6 beams.

"We got more daring in the other rooms," says Davis. In the kitchen, he gave a new look to laminate-clad cabinets with a paint that develops a rusty patina (it contains metal fragments); painted the trim with a gray-green low-sheen acrylic; lime-washed the ceiling; and replaced the vinyl flooring with a synthetic concrete tinted with gray and green pigment. The bedroom contrasts thoroughly modern colors--a vivid teal plaster and a muted violet paint--with a mix of antiques and low-voltage lighting.

The Davis paint palette

Davis used out-of-the-can paints and plasters from Australia (which he now imports). Manufactured by Sydney Harbour Paint Company, the line of water-base products includes the paint types mentioned, as well as products such as low-sheen and ultraflat acrylics, wood washes (which subtly age and color bare woods), and lime-base washes and paints (which weather and streak).