Paint Colours

More than ever before comfort, serenity and organization will be at the heart of home decor. Benjamin Moore's Colours for your Home 2008 colour card has identified three colour palettes to help you transform your home into your own private oasis.

Colour allows us to shape the emotional character of our homes,says Doty Horn, Benjamin Moore North America director of color and design. These three new colour palettes will enable you to personalize your surroundings, make them stimulating or sheltering, energized or serene.

Each colour palette represents a distinctly different expression of our need for colour and light in our homes: Modern Tranquility, Organic Comfort, and Pure Opulence . The card offers two suggested paint colour combinations for each palette; one conveys energy, the other a more relaxed mood. To help you visualize the look in your own home and then create it for yourself, the card features photos of beautiful rooms. The colour card contains actual paint chip samples, which eliminates any doubt about the true colour. In total, the card offers a collection of 24 hues.

Colour is all-important in setting the emotional parameters of a look, but it goes beyond paint. The design team reminds us that your choice of home decor including furnishings, accessories, cushions and draperies are all important components in making a living space uniquely your own:

Need a soothing respite from modern day stress? Modern Tranquility is the key.

Seeking ways to bring nature into your home decor? Organic Comfort provides the solution.

Desiring a profusion of styles and paint colours? Pure Opulence is the colour palette for you.

Stress free says it all: Modern Tranquility

Modern Tranquility has a tranquil, therapeutic aura?, states Sharon Grech, colour and design manager, Central Canada for Benjamin Moore and also a regular presenter on Citytv's CityLine . Not exactly minimalist, I'd use the word refined, but in an entirely modern context. The muted paint colours of the recommended combinations create a monochromatic look that welcomes textural contrasts raw concrete against smooth glass, unfinished wood against the shiniest silk.?

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in the colour card, in the pale leather and fabric upholstery, and the artwork over the fireplace. Textures demonstrate extreme contrast but in a soothing, not a jarring way - plate glass tables over a deep pile carpet, raw masonry fireplace beside a gleaming natural wood floor.

Home is where it all comes together: Organic Comfort

The real world is the world behind your front door. Inside, it's all yours , your feelings, your precious possessions, your loved ones. Your paint colours, your shapes, your textures. And if the natural world is important to you, and you want to bring it home, you'll feel especially good about the Organic Comfort colour palette .

Organic Comfort is a further development of the home decor trend identified by Benjamin Moore in 2007 as Natural Elements, notes Sharon . The room shelters and integrates us with the environment, rather than separating us from it. It supports current trends in domestic architecture, which offer larger spaces with more glass, more natural light, and a stronger sense of the surrounding environment. The boundary between inside and outside is fast disappearing.

Colours that define this natural aesthetic include Thousand Islands CC-308 , which will cover a room like the sails of a ship; paired with the darker Metropolis CC-546 for the ideal balance. Fabrics and textures, like sisal, add other natural elements, combining smooth, nubby, plain and patterned. An accent can be found in accessories, such as cushions in a vivid Sulphur Yellow 2151-40 .

Your best reward: Pure Opulence

If you think of your home as a source of energy, if you are the kind of person who finds comfort in vibrant colours and radiant surfaces, then you'll gravitate to the new colour palette called Pure Opulence .

Pure Opulence sparkles like the contents of a treasure chest,says Sharon . It reflects your joy in the physical universe ,the excitement of powerful colours, the uniqueness of objects brought from distant lands, the playfulness of creating unlikely combinations and daring effects.

Bold though some of these colours may be, they are balanced by calmer tones that keep the space livable. The big colours, inspired by gem stones and minerals, are the majestic Black Raspberry 2072-20 , stunning Cherokee Brick 2082-30 and a wonderful contemporary jewel tone Aegean Teal 2136-30 . They work well as backdrops to antiques and cherished collectibles. A more contemporary approach to home decor would be to build your own look with the neutrals in either colour palette, and save the vibrant colours for use as accents.