Too Much Yellow for a Modern Dining Room

One of the first orders of business when we purchased the house was to go through each room & decide which needed to be painted first.  As the kitchen & dining areas are the most important, high-traffic areas for us, Peter & I decided to start in this direction.  As you can see from the pictures of the house before we purchased it, the dining room was a bright, garish yellow.  In fact, almost every room in the house was painted a different shade of yellow.

Although I like yellow, it was an important lesson to see that not every room in a house should be a slightly different shade from the same color.  I absolutely love green, but now I know that painting the entire house in different shades of green would look equally silly to someone else.  As a nice compromise, Laura Redd had some interesting contributions to make the dining room match the dominantly yellow open floor plan downstairs but still appease my need for green. 

Because the kitchen area is in between the living room & dining area, it seemed strange that this small area was broken up into a different color orange, boxed in on either side by competing yellows.  By extending the newly selected orange for the kitchen into the dining area, the dining room & kitchen have a more cohesive feeling.  Laura suggested an accent wall of a light green (Cress green from Porter Paints) in a shade that would compliment both the terra cotta orange in the kitchen and the light yellow in the living room.  Our green kitchen accessories also play off this green accent wall to give a contrast to the orange. 

After our new paint is up, our next job will be to work with our modern dining room furniture and antique chairs to create a unique look. 
 

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