The Perfect Paint Color If You Love Green But Aren't Ready To Commit

It's exciting to plan and implement a DIY home renovation and you can make a huge shift happen with color alone without having to necessarily invest in a massive construction project. For the past few years, some nature-inspired hues, including green, have been popping up in interiors. We've been seeing bold choices everywhere from sage kitchen cabinets to stunning teal bedrooms to greige living room walls with muted green trim. While even the softer greens make a statement, any medium to dark green is a heck of a commitment. If you love green but aren't sure about whether you can live with it long-term, the perfect paint color for a reno is a white or light base color that has the merest hint of barely-there green undertones.

Your kitchen might be a perfect place for this whisper of green experiment although you can apply our recommendations to any room that suits you. Consider this hack if you happen to have an all-white room. White paint feels clean, but it can verge on harsh if it's both too bright and cool-toned, so painting it almost green will lend it greater depth and interest. It'll also help you test the waters before you make a more obvious commitment to green.  

We found a few options for a gateway green you can try before you pull out all the tropical forest stops we know are coming next. Benjamin Moore's French Canvas, which doesn't even have the word green anywhere in the title, is an upscale off-white with a trace of green-gray. It's super subtle but so much more interesting than regular white paint and it could work anywhere in the house. Rust-Oleum sells a semi-gloss cabinet paint at Home Depot called Linen, a sheer-looking wash of the lightest mint that still has a bit of warmth. Also from Home Depot, Glidden's Green Whisper is, well, the greenest one of the bunch but it's still pretty quiet and would look great in a living room or kitchen.

If you like the calm vibe of the monochrome trend, then you could match new furniture or accessories to your updated green walls. Or try out the color in a room currently painted in a darker color and see how lightening it up will feel. Don't forget the role natural light plays in every room. Rooms with a northern exposure get indirect light so your color may appear darker than expected. Southern exposure floods a room with light, enlivening every color. Eastern-facing environments get light in the morning, so the paint will darken throughout the day, and Western exposure gets the warmest late-afternoon light.