Off colour: avoiding paint choice regrets
Subtle by Colourtrend has warm brown undertones that work in cold Irish light, seen here in the hallway of Jen Sheahan's home in Rathmines. Picture: Moya Nolan
“The only certainty in life is death and taxes,” said somebody who never painted their whole house magnolia.
If there's one thing I've learned from years of poking my nose in other peoples’ homes, it's that paint regret is almost universal. Colours look so great in showrooms, don’t they? Then you get home and somehow it looks completely different on your walls.
It’s a tale as old as time. But good news – it’s avoidable. Experience has taught me that paint regrets tend to fall into a handful of very predictable categories. Here’s how you can sidestep all of them.
 Simply saying “paint it all white” and calling it a day is not the safe option it sounds like. In an Irish home with Irish light, pure white rarely looks the way you imagine. It tends to read as cold, clinical, even slightly blue – our sky gives us a lot of grey, diffuse light, and that's exactly what gets reflected back at you off a stark white wall. There is no universally good white. There is only the right white for your specific room.
For most Irish homes, the best whites lean warm – towards taupe, mushroom, or even cream rather than grey or blue. Subtle by ColourTrend has a slightly brown undertone that just works in our light. Trigg from Farrelly & Co (my personal favourite) has a sandy warmth that works with a lot of room orientations. Whatever you pick, test it properly – paint a large sheet of paper, hang it on the wall, and look at it both morning and evening, with lights on and off, before you commit.
Deep, dramatic colours can look extraordinary. We don’t always need to brighten every room – creating cosy caves can be an excellent design choice. The problem is that a lot of people hold back and accidentally create too much contrast, resulting in a chaotic or gloomy room instead of a sophisticated retreat.
When choosing bolder, darker colours for your walls, it’s safer to go all in. Colour drenching is less of a trend and more of a course correction. It is here to stay, thankfully. Paint your skirting boards, architraves, the backs of your doors, and potentially even your ceilings. Leaving the doors and skirting white while the walls go deep creates an unsettling half-finished effect with lots of jarring contrast. When everything is the same tone, the room cocoons you around you rather than closing in on you.
If that sounds too scary, use methods such as colour blocking or two-toned walls to intentionally bring in the bolder colour while not overpowering the room.
Remember when grey was the answer to everything? Floors, walls, kitchens, bathrooms – all grey, all the time. It felt fresh and contemporary, and then suddenly it didn't, and everyone who had committed to the full grey monochrome was left looking like they'd time-stamped their renovation.
Trend colours are seductive because they're everywhere when they're in fashion. But by the time a colour has reached that level of saturation, you're already a year or two behind the trend, not ahead of it. The colours that stand the test of time tend to be specific to you – colours you're genuinely drawn to, that work with your furniture and your light – rather than ones you chose because they were all over Instagram at the time.
This is the most common paint regret of all, and it's almost always caused by the same thing: trusting a tiny swatch under shop lighting. Undertones are the real culprit – what looks like a simple off-white on a business-card-sized chip can reveal itself as distinctly purple on your living room walls.
A neutral grey can veer blue. A warm cream can go yellow. It's just physics. Every paint colour has undertones, and those undertones are amplified by your light, your floors, your furniture, and which way your windows face.
The fix is simple: buy a sample pot and test it properly. Paint it onto a large sheet of white paper, hang it in every room it’s intended for, and live with it for a day or two in all lighting conditions. If you can't read the undertones from a small swatch, try mixing a tiny amount of the paint into a small pot of pure white – whatever colour comes through is what's hiding in the tin.
Most paint regret comes down to rushing – trusting swatches over proper testing or picking a colour because it looked good somewhere else without checking whether it works in your own home. Take your time. Test properly, in your actual home, in every room, in your actual light. Then you can bring in the painters.
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