Picking A Color For The Metal Stools
Me + a picture of our kitchen + photoshop = this post.
Back in December when we picked up our kitchen stools (from a school supply store for $32 a pop) we mentioned we were entertaining a number of ways to tweak them down the line (painting them, upholstering/staining the seat, etc) but simply could not shake the feeling that we should live with them a while first – simply to make sure we were not doing anything rash in the middle of a kitchen remodel. We in short hoped the room to come together, live with them a little, and then make the call.
It was in fact truly pleasant how they tied into the stainless appliances, felt kind of geek-industrial, and even brought the gray color in the wall of penny tile over into the other side of the room. But after a pleasant long time of thinking it through and weighing our options, we chose… it is time to paint them! It is not that we do not like how they look as-is as much as we think a new coat of paint could look infinitely better. From good to strong if you will. So without further ado, our musings…
Our first thought was a dark teal color. Do not mind our horribly photoshopped stool rendering (it is not a quite accurate portrayal at all, but in our brain we think we can nearly picture it).
Why dark teal? Well, see the back of the built-ins in the adjoined dining room in this older shot of the room on the right?
Since the kitchen and the dining room are now open to each other, we simply enjoy seeing a sliver of that dark teal on the built-ins when we are in there, so we thought bringing a bit more of that color in with the stools could be lively. Although it could be a little too matchy-matchy too, so we kept playing around with other options.
Like white, which is a little too… white for us. Haha. There is simply so much lightness in the cabinets and counters that although glossy white stools would look modern and clean, we think it is simply too flat for us.
Next we tried ORB (oil-rubbed bronze), which would likely be an straightforward win. We worried it would blend in too much with our floor, but at least from this terrible rendering they look like they’d pop in front of the white cabinets/counter. And they’d balance the dark hardware on the pendant lights above (I also tried a dark charcoal gray but they did not look as good as the ORB rendering, so I figured that was the better option. But it is not the most glad and exciting choice out there.
Then we tried yellow since we like the other random pops of yellow in the room – like that jar next to the fridge and that planter on the open shelves. But it looked crazy-scary. Might simply be photoshop though, so I chose to bring Clara’s yellow highchair in and see how that looks in front of the peninsula (since surely it cannot look this nuts in real life).
Sure sufficient, it looks fairly cute:
I also brought in a random HomeGoods/Joss&Main stools from other rooms (blue = HomeGoods, red = Joss&Main) simply to see how those colors would look. We in fact truly liked all three of these color options. It is lively to have a little pop of glad at the peninsula, right?
Of course the blue one looked excellent with the pops of blue on the open shelves, but this exercise in fact got us seriously considering tomato red, since it is not in many other places around the house (so it feels exciting and new). It would also pick up some of the red tones in our Lady Swimming print next to the fridge, which could be lively. But since the chairs would not be low-lying garden stools, and would be four metal stools with backs, in order to picture it, I bounced back to my good friend Photoshop.
Our only fear is that with the yellow-green walls, red or deep orange chairs are a little too McDonalds for our tastes (especially when viewed from the other side of the kitchen – looking back towards the fireplace nook, which has a lot more green paint going on than this view). So next we chose to give leaf green a try…
… and a deeper emerald color…
All of them could likely work, so they got logged as other alternatives. It was at this point that we realized that a number of things could work in our fairly neutral kitchen (white and gray and brown fairly much goes with everything), so it is simply going to come down to choosing whatever color we like best.
Next it was onto blue, where we tried a lighter teal color with a fair amount of gray in it:
Of course these renderings are not quite true to what things will truly look like in real life with light bouncing around and not everything being the same flat shade – so something that looks the best here could totally read differently in real life. But the truth is that we enjoy a room with a pop of color in the stools, like this, this, and this), and our minds change about what color we want to go with every day.
Oh and how funny is this? Right after I shot this picture…
… I walked into the office and saw this stack of books…
Guess I am simply a die-hard fan of those colors. Haha. For accessories, potential stool colors, and beyond!
You know we will keep you posted when we make a final decision! Hopefully within the next week or two – because these renderings are getting us excited. Haha. And this little photoshop exercise was comforting because it helped us realize that there are any number of ways we could go instead of having to find the “one right color” like hunting for a needle in a haystack. I am sure you folks will weigh in with your go-to stool colors in the meantime, right? Anyone else playing around in Photoshop or bringing items from other rooms to see how certain colors or shapes will work?
