Maureen Patzer
Gannett News Service

Would you consider painting your kitchen cabinets bright purple with lime green accents, your media room sunflower yellow or your bathroom cherry-blossom red?

Kim Brooks and her husband embraced those very colors and began splashing vibrant hues throughout their South Nash-ville, Tenn., loft. Opting to design their living space around bold color, Brooks said, proved a logical and satisfying choice.

“We needed our home to feel completely different from our office,” said Brooks, who owns the Finer Things Gallery along with her husband, artist Rusty Wolfe. “The gallery is a gorgeous space, but the walls are white, the ceilings are white and the trim is white.”

Though the couple sometimes struggled to find exactly the right shade for each room in the loft, it all proved worthwhile.

“It looks great and works well together,” Brooks notes. “It’s also a great space for a party, as it brings out so much discussion and energy.”

Nothing influences the vibe of a room as profoundly as color.

“Color affects us on all levels, and sometimes it’s in unintended ways,” said Ashleigh Robertson, a professor of fine arts at O’More College of Design in Franklin, Tenn. “For example, because we associate the color yellow with the sun, we think of it as a warm color.”

But too much yellow in a room, Robertson noted, can lead to aggression and even arguments.

“It’s so luminous, it can be really hard to look at,” she said. “It’s all about proportion.”

Theory dates to Newton

It’s also about the psychology of color, a theory that is rooted in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, the world’s first color theorist, Robertson noted.

In the 1600s, Newton ran light through a prism and it separated into all the visible colors, leading to the discovery that each color has its own light wave. Centuries later, not only do designers and color experts know the human eye is most sensitive to yellow and green light waves and red is the longest and blue is the shortest light wave, but they also know what effect those colors have on the mind.

“There are numerous studies going back many years that show the impact of color on your psyche,” said Debbie Zimmer, a color expert with the Rohm and Hass Paint Quality Institute. “We do a lot of quantitative and qualitative studies and depending on the tint, tone or shade, color is influencing your living space.”

Different hues, reactions

For example, experts said, too much orange might make you feel too cautious, a cool blue may help suppress the appetite and red can raise blood pressure.

When it comes to color and kids, however, how they view color may simply be a matter of ages and stages.

“Kids don’t always associate color with emotion,” said Sharon Davis, co-owner of Two Sisters Painting in Nashville, which specializes in painting children’s bedrooms. “Sometimes they like pink simply because it’s pink.”

Don’t be surprised if your child’s favorite color changes every two or three years, Davis said. Tweens gravitate toward bold strips and patterns and not necessarily color, she said, which may reflect their growing need for self-expression; teenagers simply want to look cool and unique and will throw together popular colors without regard for rules.

“One thing that doesn’t change is that all kids have an opinion about what they want,” Davis said. “And all kids love to show off their rooms.”

As for Brooks and Wolfe, it’s been almost nine years since their loft began blooming with color, and though it might be time for a fresh coat of paint, they intend to keep things bold.

“We are so lucky to have colors we fell in love with,” Brooks said. “We wake up every morning and appreciate being here.”