Simply White is 2016’s colour of the year

Published Oct 27, 2015

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Washington - Influential American paint company Benjamin Moore last week announced its 2016 Colour of the Year: Simply White.

What? With memories of the earthy Marsala (Pantone’s 2015 Colour of the Year), how could a plain vanilla get such an exalted ranking?

“White is transcendent, powerful and polarising – it is either taken for granted or obsessed over,” Benjamin Moore creative director Ellen O’Neill said in the company’s announcement.

The release also said this particular colour was chosen from the company’s more than 250 selections of white paint because “it was the most neutral, level and constant in the various light sources used in today’s design environments”.

Reaction in the design community was not surprise, but rather a bit of caution.

Miles Redd, a designer known for his richly hued interiors, was rooting for a daffodil yellow or maybe a shade of blue. “I don’t think of white as a colour. But I know it is. I live in technicolour,” Redd said. “Most people do go for white paint. Colour is something people don’t always know how to handle. I guess it’s not surprising, given that white sheets and white towels are the number one sellers, too.”

Interior designer Mary Douglas Drysdale wasn’t surprised. “I think it’s consistent to where design has been moving over the past three to four years. There is a paring back and a real simplification. I think it has to do with the interest in de-cluttering,” Drysdale said, praising the choice. “It’s not one of those treatments that is a weird colour that everybody can’t have. It’s about the democratisation of design.”

“I have never met a white I didn’t like,” said Margaret Russell, editor in chief of Architectural Digest.

For professional colour consultants, choosing a specific white paint always requires a lot of testing. Jean Molesworth Kee has been seeing a lot of white in European design blogs, and thinks white will replace grey as the hot colour.

Kee counsels that Simply White is just one of many neutral choices. “You have to test it in your own house.” Actually, she said, white isn’t right for every home. “If it’s somewhere where there is no light, it goes shadowy and dies.”

“White is my favourite colour,” said designer Erin Paige Pitts. “My kids joke that there is no such colour in their art classes. But my house is almost all white.”

The Washington Post

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