The Coral Ridge of my youth was a land of white houses with white roofs. By the time I returned in the mid-90’s it was a land of beige houses with white roofs. This was considered to be progress.
In the land of neutral, the house that my partner and I bought stood out in a spectacularly garish manner. Painted the kind of pea soup green that is usually associated with penitentiaries or asylums, it also featured a lurid turquoise trim that matched the shag carpet in the living room. We were looking at paint chips before the ink was dry on the closing papers.
We had thought to perhaps paint the house a subtle yellow (“Sunshine” the color chart branded it) or even a tasteful coffee hue (“Café au lait!”) but we were dissuaded by the painter, a man of great skill and strong opinions. “Yellow?” he said with revulsion; “what do you think this is, Wilton Manors?” He similarly nixed “coffee,” “terra cotta” and “sage”. “Do you want your neighbors to know you have no taste?” he asked. He waved his finger at me: “What works in Victoria Park is death in Coral Ridge,” he said ominously and he painted our house beige with white trim to match the white tile roof.
Because he was a careful craftsman of the old school, and because he chose an excellent brand of paint, a decade later our paint still looked good even though we were thoroughly sick of the color. Five years after that. after 15 years of well-water sprinklers and assorted hurricanes the house was starting to look shabby and forlorn. It was time to repaint and this time we determined to spice it up a bit.
Things have changed sufficiently in the neighborhood that we no longer fear that mobs of well-coifed neighbors will advance on us with torches and pitchforks if we deviate from a neutral palette. We have neighbors on our block who have painted their homes in vivid shades of rust, tangerine, taupe and persimmon. The old painter retired and his son has taken over. “Don’t be afraid of color!” he told us. “Let the rainbow be your inspiration! Your house is a statement of who you are!”
With this newfound artistic freedom Brian and I started collecting paint chips. “I like this shade of heather,” he said. “Everyone uses heather, it’s the new beige,” I responded, considering a hue mysteriously called “shade.” We rejected, with very little discussion, “poinsettia” and “allure” and also rejected “peanut brittle” and “Evangeline.”
We briefly considered an intense little chip that reminded us of springtime, but decided we could not paint our house “pansy”. “It’s really more like “daffodil” anyway,” I said . Next I was taken with a sedate little hue called “straw” but Brian was dismissive: “Not ‘straw’,” he said, “it’s just too 2008.”
Making no headway, we decided to throw caution to the wind a choose a color at random. I opened the color card, closed my eyes and pointed. Brian was aghast at my choice. “Vomit?” he said, “there’s a paint called ‘vomit’?” I looked closely at the card, squinting. “That’s not ‘vomit’,” I said, “it’s called ‘varmint’.” Brian got his reading glasses and looked again. “’Vomit’ makes more sense, actually,” he decided.
After many weeks and many paint chips we finally decided on a color we both liked, but the painter disapproved. “You chose beige?” he said, “I thought you wanted to spice it up some.” I was immediately defensive. “We did spice it up,” I said, “that’s not beige. It is ‘nutmeg’. ”