Behr Paint Colors Espresso Martin
September 1, 2007|BY SUZANNE C. RYAN BOSTON GLOBE
After 20 years of assignment as a able painter, Joe Ford isn't calmly wowed by a can of paint. The buyer of Ford Painting & Wallpapering Co. in Swampscott, Mass., he's agreeable advantageous $35 for a gallon of Benjamin Moore's AquaVelvet.
"To me, it's a abundant product," he said.
But acrylic manufacturers like kt.Color appetite Ford to pay alike more. Based in Switzerland, kt.Color afresh launched an autogenous acrylic band in the United States, alleged Le Corbusier. The tab? $90 to $262 a gallon.
And kt.Color isn't alone.
A cardinal of acrylic manufacturers are ablution "super premium" products. With the accessible athirst to flush their homes (without accepting to tap home disinterestedness curve to pay for it), acrylic makers are scrambling to accommodated appeal with high-quality paints that top $50 a gallon. Big box retailers are additionally buffing up their offerings with trendier blush palettes for style-savvy buyers.
Martha Stewart aloof launched a band at Lowe's featuring 350 colors with cozy-chic names such as Rolling Pin and Sweet Potato Pie. The Home Depot has formed out the Signature Palettes, which analyze the season's hot colors and acclaim hues from anniversary of its three acrylic lines: Ralph Lauren, Behr, and Glidden. And Benjamin Moore afresh launched the Aura line: It's odorless, dries quickly, and doesn't crave album underneath. Alike better, at $54.95 a gallon, it never needs added than two coats.
"Color is a bargain investment. It's not copse bank or a adorned bean finish. You can change it," said Elizabeth Lowrey Clapp, arch at Elkus Manfredi Architects in Boston.
"Ten years ago, everybody capital gray, white, or beige. Now bodies accept the ability of color."
Clapp said her own Federal-style townhouse has 31 colors upstairs, all from Martin Senour.
"Every allotment of abstraction is a altered shade. The ceilings are altered colors. They ambit from chicken to red to blooming to lavender," she said.
There's no catechism consumers are active about color, acknowledgment in ample allotment to the access of home architecture television shows and magazines over the accomplished few years. In March, HGTV launched Blush Splash, a affairs that teaches admirers how to use color. And aloof aftermost month, the arrangement premiered a anticipated companion: Blush Correction, a absoluteness appearance area an autogenous artisan helps homeowners adjustment adverse blush choices in their homes.
"Even men now apperceive the aberration amid mint, moss and grass green," said Christine Chow, administrator of associates for the barter accumulation the Blush Association of the United States. "Consumers accept absolutely accepted blush in all aspects of their lives," she said, "from iPods to cellphones to computers to clothing."
With a adeptness customer base, acrylic makers are accepting added creative. The Donald Kaufman Blush Collection, for example, can arise to change blush in altered lighting. The abstruse is that Kaufman uses 12 or added pigments to accomplish a blush as against to the industry accepted of bond six or fewer. That affluence doesn't appear cheap: The acrylic costs $76.95 to $85.95 a gallon. (DonaldKaufmancolor.com has a complete account of suppliers.)
Ralph Lauren has a new candlelight-finish top covering that reflects ablaze with an irised shimmer, accessible alone at The Home Depot. Anna Sova Luxury Organics has ambrosial acrylic additives in scents such as lemon, vanilla, and orange and cloves. The band will be accessible in aboriginal 2008 at annasova.com. Le Corbusier's palettes, called afterwards the backward Swiss artisan and artist, are fabricated with authentic mineral pigments so the colors are affluent and textured, the aggregation says. In the United States, the acrylic is accessible alone at Aronson's Floor Covering in New York.
Even with a $100-a-can bulk tag, a beginning covering of acrylic is still one of the atomic big-ticket means to amend a home.
"Sometimes bodies get sticker shock, but I'm like, 'It's alone a gallon of paint. Let's aloof do it,' " said Susan Orpin, arch of the North Easton-based autogenous architecture close The Orpin Group. Her admired acrylic is Donald Kaufman.
"The aberration amid a affection acrylic and a beneath big-ticket acrylic can accomplish a difference," she said.
William Miller, an adviser in the administration of painting at Rhode Island School of Design, agrees. Acrylic is fabricated up of pigments (that accommodate a color), a adhesive (to attach the pigments to a apparent and accommodate texture), and a bread-and-butter (to adulterate the adhesive so it can be brushed or formed on), he said.
What makes a acrylic accomplished is the bulk and affection of pigments acclimated and whether the pigments are light-fast or permanent, he added.
"Traditionally, bartering paints were not formulated to aftermost 100 years," he said. "They were meant to aftermost bristles or seven years."
But advancements in amoebic allure are alteration things.
