Today’s decorating dilemma:

We live in a two story open floor design.  We have a light beige carpet throughout most of the house, except for the foyer and kitchen area that divide the middle of the house which has wood flooring. Depending on the time of day the carpet has a slight pink hue.

We are having trouble finding the right wall color everything we see seems to clash, perhaps we are choosing the wrong hue?  I am looking for a nice neutral color that can be used in several rooms (ie, two story great room, living room and adjoining dining rooms etc.) that won’t clash with the carpet.  Any suggestions?  Warm Regards, Cindy

Kate suggests:

Cindy, you are not alone when it comes to feeling frustrated when trying to find a wall color that matches beige carpet.  The main reason people have difficulty is that they cannot determine the undertone of the carpet or the paint or both.

If you have a carpet with yellow undertones and a wall color with red undertones they are not going to go as well together as two colors with the same undertones.  It sounds like your carpet has red undertones (since you mention it can look slightly pinkish at times) so my suggestion is to look for beiges with red undertones.

So I’m imagining your next questions is how to know if a beige has red undertones and that would be a very good question.  Of course your paint dealer should be able to answer that questions for you but to get an immediate idea I suggest you look at the Behr paint website.

I noticed when I was in Home Depot that Behr has tried to take the guess work out of the undertone issue for their customers by arranging the paint swatches not only by color family but also by undertone.  When you view the display looking up and down you see the color family and going across the bands are by undertone.  For example if you look at the section of green swatches in the upper section the swatches are the ones with blue undertones, the ones in the middle have yellow undertones and towards the bottom red undertones [Not sure if that is the exact order but you get my point].

The same is true on their website although not as clearly spelled out for all color families for the neutrals they give you the choice of yellow based, red based or blue based.  A look at the color swatches listed for each can start to give you an idea of the differences and set you in the right direction for finding a color that matches your carpet.

Here are screen shots of their red based and yellow based neutrals to give you an idea.

RED-BASED NEUTRALS

YELLOW-BASED NEUTRALS

Are your current paint swatches more yellow or blue based than red? If so this could be the reason that they are “clashing” with your carpet.