From Dreams To Dreamsicles

Color is how Mother Nature makes us fall in love with life. We want to fall in love with our homes.

It's not hard to paint a color. It's hard to paint a feeling.

This revelation began at the onset of a dream. A Street of Dreams.

In most cities, there is a cluster of model homes featured by high-end builders with the latest products and local craftsmanship. In Portland, Oregon, it is an annual show called the Street of Dreams, which takes place at a top-of-the-hill, crème-de-la-crème neighborhood. The general public gets to tour the homes knowing few can afford them, but at least they can take home an image of what perfect would be if you could wrap it up and take it home.

Luckily, I got hooked up with a very well-known designer who, at that time, was a local celebrity and had a reputation for being a visionary. Everyone felt he knew where he was going with his vision, and I was going to follow him straight to the guest powder bath in his project at the Street of Dreams.

Who doesn’t love a little color in a powder room?

I was so ready for the challenge.

My color work was going to be seen by everyone. Then came one of several turning points that took me from being a color consultant to being a color theorist.

I had mixed rich greens and burnt terracotta shades to make the walls look like they had aged to a green perfection. This was a perfect color relationship, or so I thought, with the orange terracotta tiles in the bathroom and the greens woven throughout the orange, burnt red, and sage green fabrics in the living room. Gloriously soft with the golden bamboo floors.

He hated my color reflections.

At first, he found them to be “too bright,” and I quickly realized that a bit more muted would bring the walls back a bit. Better? No. He wanted them way back, all the way back to the grout.

I kept muting them until I realized he wanted them neutral, as in the color of the grout. He wanted the shades of the wall to be in the grout color. A light battleship gray.

Clearly, the designer was working with a homeowner who loved warm colors. His palette was, and has always been, neutral shades of white.

I remember walking out the door, looking at a beautiful view of the sunset, and thinking I can’t climb a mountain top that leads to someone else’s view.

At that moment, I ran into another designer on the street who needed a laundry room done. I took it, and my career as a color faux-finisher took off.

The designer had a color in mind. I had a sunset to think about.

Like colors in a great painting, color harmony does not stand alone. It is the connection, relationship, and position of a color in an environment that makes the difference between seeing it and feeling it.

That bathroom tile was an organic orange with a green patina. Battleship gray would not have been a shirt I would wear with those pants. It's not what I think of when I look at a sunset, a terracotta pot in an Italian garden or an adobe home in Sant Fe.

You can hate the color orange and yet look at a sunset and find it necessary among all the other colors to see perfection. As a matter of fact, you would never take it out. You are not asking why it is there or if it makes sense. You love it instantly with your eyes.

Color, while personal, is not private.

I wanted to go with a Dreamsicle moment.

Maybe this is why orange and cream became a Dreamsicle, because orange has always known how to carry sunshine, sweetness, childhood, and joy in the same bite. It is bright and soft at the same time. It is citrus and comfort. It is the color of play wrapped around something creamy enough to feel like a dream.

That is what orange does.

It makes the dream feel possible.

Your Color Baggage is a bottomless bag filled with colorful custom memories and experiences that allow you to create a world of beautiful harmony for yourself and others. This makes you one of a kind, and your life custom-made.

It is easy to trust yourself when you know who you are.

Painting is a creative, sensorial experience, not a visual one.

Orange is associated with creativity, joy, exploration, and sacral energy. It is centered in the lower belly, the womb of our creative ability to experience ourselves through connection and collaboration with other people and the rest of the world.

Creativity unlocks the power to generate and discover ideas, alternatives, and possibilities that bring joy and entertainment to our lives.

This is what the Street of Dreams taught me. The dream was never about getting the perfect color in the perfect house for the perfect designer. The dream was learning that color has to be felt, not forced.

A home is not a model. A home is not an image of perfect wrapped up for someone else to take home.

A home is a coloring book.

And you are allowed to color it the same way you did when you were a child, with the same excitement, exploration, and revelation you experienced when you opened your coloring book and trusted what you felt when you saw your colors.

Coloring is an act of belonging. You are the palette.