Color Matters
“What a gorgeous color. Especially for today!” my dermatologist says through his charcoal-colored mask as his words wake me from a very brief nap. I press my hands against the white butcher paper. The red on my fingertips seem brighter against the fennel green doctor’s table. Fennel green makes for a good cabinet color, but not for a chair, I think. My doctor notes the color of my nails too. He mentions the low gray skies and I consider —very briefly—how I could have managed a few months in Europe, always this kind of weather. I roll up my orange sleeve and we examine the pigmentation of my elbow. Brown–darker than my skin–patches look like inkblots where large white patches were just three weeks ago. My doctor and I marvel at the work of this topical medicine that has seemed to arrive on the scene overnight and erased 24 years of my body’s history.
He snaps a photo on his iPhone for evidence, and before I know it, I am sharing a photo of a 9-year-old me at my great-grandmother’s party in Richmond, Virginia, standing in a pastel blue and pink floral dress. The lack of color in my skin is obvious to the camera lens. In the photo my hands are in my mouth, and it is clear to me now (and not me then) that the white on my elbow has not yet taken shape… but soon it will when the white that is shown under my eyes begins its slow retreat. “It felt like a game of whack-a-mole,” I joke with my doctor, before he gets serious, noting the efficacy of the medicine, and my need to stay out of the sun.
What else is there to do but joke when for years, my color has consumed conversation. And increasingly so over the last month when I wondered if I would remember childhood Vitiligo if the white spots were no-longer a physical reminder. I take a longer look at that photograph of myself. How can I forget her, when I carry her in everything I do?
Color matters.
The pink on my dress in the photo is nearly the same color pink as in The Mae House living room and hallway. Just three weeks ago, I hauled a 80% full can of it from upstate to Brooklyn on the Amtrak in my granny cart so that I could paint my new living room the same shade: Middleton Pink by Farrow & Ball. For obvious reasons, one would rather not waste paint. But in assessing the house, the colors, and the way it makes me feel when I enter (and when I leave), transferring that same color to my new apartment felt more than right. It was necessary.
For the last year, so many have asked about the colors of The Mae House. It’s not that it’s been difficult to write about it as much as I’ve wanted to take time mapping the linguistics to my color choices. And for that matter, hoping that the story of the colors and how it makes me and others feel, takes a more detailed form with time. There’s one thing to design a space so that it looks damn good. It’s another to design and then share when it hinges on a personal period of my life.
When I walked around the house with my laptop to my face, Grace holding a color fan, while Nicole Collado, my colour expert, accompanied us on video, I didn’t imagine it would be a full year before I got around to sharing the story. But you shouldn’t rush design, and you shouldn’t rush a story either.
Before my call consultation in the summer of 2021, Nicole had me share the Pinterest mood boards and decks we created for brands that helped us refine my design goals for The Mae House. From minute zero, Nicole zeroed in on the heart of the story. She caught my references, including many homes from the 80s, reminiscent of my 90s childhood, the color of my dress, the color of my skin, all a part of me.
During our hour-long chat, Nicole said the word story quite often, and when I got on camera with the Farrow & Ball team in March of 2022, I found myself using it too–even as it felt like my story was just beginning to be written. (And yes, I had Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten as my phone ringer for the entirety of 2004.)
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There’s very little documentation of bell hooks’s home over the years, but a few months back while editing my book, I stumbled upon this 1997 New York Times interview in which Michel Marriott documents her Greenwich Village apartment with their words, and if I close my eyes, I am brought into the room with bell hooks back then. I feel I know her from seeing the space–her uncomplicated Buddhism, the rich power of color choice.
“Red is a favorite color, evoking, she said, the power of life and blood. She also has a red telephone and a red wooden chair, and the abstract painting by Margo Humphreys that hangs over her bed is rendered mostly in reds.”
There are no reds in The Mae House, as far as paint is concerned. Middleton Pink, is delicate and gentle, and changes (like so much of Farrow & Ball’s colors) throughout the day. Middleton Pink is the heart of The Mae House, its center, and all of the other rooms, all of the colors in those rooms, point toward it, sing in harmony with it. There’s Tallow in the primary room, Ammonite in the gray room. The Billie room is Stiffkey Blue, and it’s Pelt in the community den. Not to be missed: my last-minute decisions to paint the fireplace Brinjal and the kitchen cabinets Peignoir, which makes the gray grout between the kitchen tiles look lavender. Each color is Farrow & Ball Modern Emulsion, which is mold-proof, scuff-proof, and perfect (truly) when you plan on having children or guests.
A few weeks ago, I was tasked with sharing what the color green means to me for Kate spade New York, which quickly allowed for a rush of memories of finalizing painting The Mae House. We painted the mud room Yeabridge Green, which Nicole, my colour expert, noted was a wonderful entry point to the whole story. It also became the end as one of the last rooms folks have seen. When I think of the color of the mud room, I think of beginnings and endings coming together, of how stories span lengths of time and how we creatively find ways to share them. I wrote in my post for Kate Spade that the green feels like a promise of a new way; a way I could only truly settle into a year after laying that path and watching it live a little.
Looking forward and looking back, as a little girl in me, as the woman I hope to be is conceived more with time, along with these dreams, as I (in some regard) rub-out other versions, I can’t help but think of the expansiveness of color.
Color matters.
Like I wrote for kate spade New York,
“You've got to be seeing something, where there was nothing, as a way to reimagine care.”