walls & ceilings
ONCE YOU DISCOVER the decorated wall—paint techniques and printed papers, embossed surfaces, ornamental plaster, tile—white walls may come to feel like the absence of finish, or remind you of the whitewash once used in stables. History offers options from subtle to fantastic. You need not copy them outright to do something unique.
Turns out, the murky “colonial” palette of the 1950s–1970s was based on paint samples embedded with dirt and altered by time; true colors of that early period include brilliant yellow, Prussian blue and turquoise, clear green, blood red, and rich ivories tinted with grey, yellow, or pink. By the 1870s the tripartite treatment
