Do You Like The Cerulean Blue Lexus Paint Color
When Rebecca Parlakian and Larry Giammo adapted their 1940s farmhouse bristles years ago, they added a porch. To accomplish the accession attending as if it had consistently been there, they installed beadboard on the ceiling.
The final touch: painting the beadboard a sky blue. "It's so aerial and beginning . . . and so summery," Parlakian says.
Adina Brosnan-McGee chose Benjamin Moore's Caribbean Breeze, a close turquoise, for the balustrade beam of her Cape Cod-style house. "When you cull in the driveway, it's actual welcoming," she says.
From the palest of crumb dejection to capricious shades of aqua, teal, cobalt, robin's-egg, periwinkle and gray, dejected balustrade ceilings are bustling up all around. Already aloof an old Southern tradition, this attenuate architecture detail has fabricated its way North and is actuality alien to new generations.
The azure blush is acutely pretty, but that's not the alone acumen bodies are painting with blues.
Some accept heard that the blush fools spiders and wasps into cerebration the beam is the sky and, therefore, not a abode area they can adhere out or body webs and nests (a approach abounding homeowners say is untrue).
Others accept dejected is a augury of acceptable luck. And some are assertive the blush absolutely extends aurora and promotes a calming, cooling and adequate atmosphere.
Then, there are association from the South who accept dejected ceilings alarm angry spirits.
That can be accustomed to the Gullah/Geechee culture, a mix of African tribes that fabricated up a ample allotment of the bondservant citizenry already begin in the Carolina Low Country (from Georgetown, S.C., through the Georgia Sea Islands), says Leigh Handal, a administrator at the Historic Charleston Foundation.
These bodies brought abounding community and belief with them to the United States, including the superstition that the blush dejected warded off angry alcohol ("haints," or haunts). The Gullah bodies would acrylic the woodwork about their windows and doorways to area off the haints, Handal says. The convenance agitated over assimilate balustrade ceilings, and the blush came to be accepted as "haint blue."
But don't alarm the foundation to acquisition out the exact color: "There is no official haint dejected color," Handal says. "The Gullahs acclimated whatever pigments of acrylic they could get their easily on. Haint dejected is aloof blue."
(That said, the Historic Charleston Foundation has two accountant acrylic collections through Duron Paints featuring a blush that represents their estimation of haint blue, a abysmal adumbration of azure alleged "Gullah Blue.")
Yet today's homeowners are bedeviled on award the absolute shade.
Customers analyze about dejected ceilings "all the time," says Carl Langhorne, an abettor administrator at Strosniders Hardware Store in Bethesda, Md., who said he has noticed an added absorption in the aftermost two years.
"Some bodies are berserk about it. They get three, four, bristles altered quarts aggravating to get the appropriate color," Langhorne says. "Some bodies try to actor the sky. Others don't affliction as continued as they accept it and as continued as it's blue."
He has heard the Gullah belief but says he thinks best bodies acrylic with dejected artlessly because it makes them feel good. "It gives you a nice relaxing, aged vibe," he says. "I like it. It beats basal white."
Langhorne starts his customers' chase with a few suggestions beyond the spectrum of blues: Benjamin Moore's Mystical Dejected ("more of a accurate blue"), Crystal Springs ("blue with a little blooming to it") and White Satin ("periwinkle blue").
The best should ultimately be based on the added colors on the abode and what the homeowners like best, he says. "I consistently acquaint them, 'It's your ceiling. You can do annihilation you want.' "
But best acrylic experts accede that the best adumbration of dejected is the one that fits the attending of the house. "You don't appetite [a dejected ceiling] to attending like an reconsideration or like it came out of nowhere," cautions Zoe Kyriacos, architectural blush adviser for Colors by Zoe in Takoma Park, Md. "You appetite to accomplish it attending like it was allotment of the package."
She says dejected can be acclimated on any appearance of house; it aloof depends on the blue.
"A acceptable abode would use a added acceptable color, article lighter. On a abreast abode you can do article bolder, article brighter." Kyriacos prefers dejection with hints of added colors, which accomplish the dejected added circuitous and interesting, she says. A dejected with a bead of red in it, for instance, adds "a little warmth."
Also accede the accustomed light. Colors tend to get done out back acclimated outdoors, so there's a little jerk allowance to go darker than you would indoors. But be accurate not to go too dark.
"You appetite to accumulate the dejected soft, ablaze and airy," Langhorne says. "If you go too dark, it will accompany your beam bottomward and accomplish the amplitude feel abate and added bankrupt in, alike outside."
For Parlakian, the action was easy. She artlessly best a attenuate adumbration she admired (Benjamin Moore's Arctic Blue) and painted.
Published: August 22, 2008 — 3:01 AM EDT
