Ask Maria: Help my Revere Pewter Cabinets look Purple!

In some homes, warm green grey colours like Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter or Edgecomb Grey start to look a little purple. People want to blame the lighting, but more often it’s because you chose the wrong colour or the wrong neutral undertone. Let me explain.

Help! My Revere Pewter Cabinets Look Purple!

This is a great question that will help anyone who has had a similar issue with this popular green grey:

We’ve just had our kitchen cabinets professionally painted Revere Pewter.  They colour matched it but I think it is not 100% identical, looks more pink than the BM paint swatch. 

We have new Frosty Carrina countertops and white subway tiles. I was so looking forward to this change BUT now my cabinets look PURPLE.  I am so disappointed.

The floor tiles are greenish and off white, walls are BM Classic Grey. The light bulb is LED 2700K. Thinking of trying 4000 or even 5000. The kitchen window faces west.

Does my white subway tiles make purple stand out more?  Or the western light? Is there anything I can do except trying a cooler or whiter bulb?  Please help!

Throughout the grey trend, I heard this a lot. That in some homes, warm green greys like BM Edgecomb Grey or Revere Pewter went purple. However, this is the first time I received the right photos, so I could explain visually, why this was happening

And everyone quickly blamed it on the lighting.

Let me be clear. Yes, of course there are times when the light changes the colour. However, usually the problem is not enough natural light (making a light colour look grey or dingy). Or reflections from outside at times of the day where the light comes in at strong angles. And yes, sometimes a wall colour can look quite different in natural vs. artificial light.

However, people generally give exposure too much credit for affecting paint colour. And, if you don’t understand undertones, there’s nowhere else to go, except to blame it on the lighting.

My System for Specifying Colour

When you learn my System for Specifying Colour, if you choose the correct neutral undertone to begin with, it should look right MOST of the time.

Then, if the light changes the colour for an hour or two, it’s no big deal.

But if you chose the wrong colour or the wrong neutral undertone, well that’s when, of course it will look wrong. ALL. THE. TIME.

Why?

Because you simply picked the wrong colour.

Not to be confused with the lighting.

I go into this in great depth in my Specify Colour with Confidence workshops.

How to compare colours.

Anyway, the reason this particular green grey undertone turns violet in a house with Tuscan finishes is because the neutrals in a Tuscan house were primarily undertones of gold beige, sage greens and pink beige (+ lots of Travertine). Therefore, if you attempt to introduce grey because ‘Dammit, you want to be current’… well, it’s not going to look right.

Here’s why. In the Tuscan trend, we were using a lot of beige. Technically (stay with me here), beiges are all quite yellow or “creamy.” My system was born when I distinguished the subtle undertones of different beiges, or yellow-based neutral paint colours. They are Pink Beige, Yellow Beige and Green Beige. But ALL beiges are more yellow than grey colours.

For example, the difference between a green beige and a green grey is technically how yellow vs. violet it is.

Manchester Tan (green beige) is more yellow than Edgecomb Gray (green grey) below. Are you still with me?

Manchester Tan {Green Beige} and Edgecomb Gray {Green Grey}

Grey paint colours are cooler, more shaded neutrals, and they have more prominent violet and blue undertones as compared to beiges. And they are comparatively less yellow.

Because remember, neutrals are neutral because they have ALL the primary colours mixed together in them, the difference is in the proportions.

I don’t want to get too technical here, so here is the takeaway. If you place a grey next to a beige, the grey will look relatively more blue or violet or too cool to relate.

A LOT of people painted their open floor plan Tuscan houses with the grey paint colours in warm undertones like Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter and Edgecomb Gray in an attempt to update them. And it worked in many cases, however, it was common to hear that these warm greys turned surprisingly purple or blue.

Baffin Island {Green Gold Beige} and Revere Pewter {Green Gray}

This is Benjamin Moore Baffin Island CC 270 (above left), a green gold beige, and Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter, a green grey (above right). See how the strong yellow and green undertones of Baffin Island make Revere look cool and almost lavender?

And below is Benjamin Moore Silver Dollar 1460, a very cool blue grey, and Revere Pewter (below). Here, Revere looks “warm” and even beige by comparison.

Silver Dollar {Cool Blue Grey} and Revere Pewter {Green Gray}

All this is to say, that in the context of warm beiges, even a warm grey can look too cool or purple (and a lot of people see pink in purple undertones since purple is made of red and blue).

And this is because colour behaves in relationship to the colours surrounding it. It will distinguish itself by its differences COMPARED to other colours.

This is why an expert knows you must always compare and test colour.

So when I saw her sage green floor tile, I was not surprised that Revere Pewter looked more violet than expected. Revere Pewter has a green undertone compared to other greys, but next to sage green it is not nearly as green.

Does all this make your head spin? That’s exactly why my System for Specifying Colour works so well. I have already curated the 50 neutrals you’ll need in all the 9 undertones in my Core Collection of large sample boards which you can purchase here.

Anyway, first, let’s find out if the paint colour was in fact not perfectly matched.

I asked my reader to take a paint chip and place it on the cabinet, but she took it a step further and took this photo which shows the boxes (that were painted DIY with actual Benjamin Moore Paint) and the doors, which were sprayed professionally with a colour match.

You can see that the door is slightly more violet than the actual paint colour. This doesn’t help at all when the colour was bound already to look more violet compared with the sage green floor tile.

Here’s the kitchen (below). You can see that the tile is more of a sage green and upon first glance it looks like it is green and cream.

However, when we photoshopped the cabinets on the right to a colour that matched the floor better, now you could clearly see, that the background of the tile is actually pink beige and not cream at all. So the tile is sage green and pink beige.

Bad, right? Now the floor looks even more old and dated. And of course the pink beige undertone of the creamy background in the tile stands out even more.

How to see the neutral undertones in a photo.

One more thing. When we ask for photos for our eDesign consultations, this is how we can see the undertone, ONLINE, and not in person.

We ask for a sheet of white paper to be placed on everything so we can see, are we dealing with a true white? Off-white? Cream? Or is it actually beige or grey?

As you can see in this photo below, placing the white paper directly on the tile, enables us to see that the  undertone of the tile is clearly pink beige.

This is also part of the Business of Colour that you’ll learn on the third day of my colour workshops.

Okay, so painting the cabinets sage green is definitely not the answer. However, we certainly don’t want to paint them pink beige either. And, painting them off-white would still highlight the pink-beige undertone.

Since my lovely reader had them professionally sprayed (which is expensive), let’s see if there’s another solution.

During December, we had dinner at the Blue Water Cafe in downtown Vancouver and I noticed a couple scratches on the floor where we were sitting and realized they had actually painted the existing terra cotta tile, BLACK (below).

So if a commercial restaurant with lots of traffic can do this, so can you.

We have already established that no matter what colour we paint the cabinets, the tile will still look bad and dated.

Especially because it should also have been installed randomly. However, the tile installer made the decision to install them all in the same direction.

Here it is photoshopped to a colour similar to Benjamin Moore Wrought Iron. Obviously when it gets painted the pattern will disappear, but I wanted you to be able to see the grout lines, so we just photoshopped the floor so you could see how much better it looks painted!

And you could even go further, if you had the time and the energy and stencil this floor!

Cutting edge stencils and how to paint them

There are lots of step-by-step tutorials online where you can learn exactly how and which product to use!

This is definitely the time and place to incorporate the look of trendy, encaustic tile!

How long it will last is certainly another conversation. But adding a pattern with a stencil will downplay any wear and tear and distract from it with its loveliness.

I’m sure paint has come a long way but when I was growing up, my Mom would paint our bad linoleum floors in the kitchen of the little house we rented, every two years.

Regardless, just painting the tile floor that will never be amazing is the smartest way to handle this colour dilemma until you can change out the floor. Eventually, an affordable wood look floor like laminate or LVP would look great in here.

Here is a gorgeous kitchen painted Revere Pewter with wood floors below. Just look at that island painted in a blue grey accent colour making our green grey look so creamy and warm 😉

Source: John K Anderson

If you are painting your cabinets this year, you can buy a single eDesign paint colour consultation here.

Or if you’re renovating a kitchen, you can buy our ‘Create a Classic Kitchen’ package here.

If you want to learn how to understand undertones, download my ‘How to Choose Paint Colours’ ebook here.

If you have an Ask Maria question (that hasn’t already been covered) for this column, please email me photos, taken in good natural light, without flash, and email them here.

PS. Here’s an update from my reader!

She said, “This solution was totally unexpected as we never looked into the tiles as a source of the issue, but IT TOTALLY MAKES SENSE NOW!

We are going to paint the tiles as soon as the weather gets warmer and we are excited about it. We have an egg chair nearby  in the family room and the colour is identical to BM Wrought Iron :)) Pic attached.

Hope it will be ok with the rest of the space.”

Related posts:

5 Reasons Your Paint Colour Looks Wrong. It’s Not the Lighting

Ask Maria: Do’s and Dont’s for Installing Encaustic Tile

A Light Colour will Never Come to Life in a Dark Room