What Paint Color Is Best For Selling My Home?

I love to paint. It is one of the (relatively speaking) fastest and reasonable investments you can make to dramatically change up the interior feel and sensibility of your home. My three basic rules, followed by my three favorite colors:

Painting Guidelines

1. Quality of the Paint Job: If you are thinking of “slapping some color on” quickly, I would add caution against the fast and furious approach. A sloppy paint job may end up working against you, as buyers might feel that if the walls are painted poorly, what lies behind them may be of concern as well. While you don’t need a job reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel, you do need a painter that believes in some good and basic wall prep, before paint is applied.

2. Finish: High sheen shows everything– and I mean every imperfection on a surface. It also can vary in terms of the room personality it creates: looking highly stylized and sleek or looking overdone and gawdy. If you don’t have a decorator guiding you, best to keep a high sheen finish to trim (moldings, door surrounds) or not at all. Eggshell is low sheen so as not to be too reflective and more forgiving than a flat finish (my usual “go-to” finish) which is completely unforgiving but classic.

3. Color: I’m all about flow. In most cases, for selling purposes, unless you have 9 foot+ ceiling heights, I would suggest you keep the walls and ceilings the same color. The results promise a sense of harmony in the space. I put a great deal of emphasis on how colors flow from room to room, and work of the floor color and dominant furniture pieces to select the right color for each room, but those colors must make sense in an overall color palette for the home. White is my Go-To color for staging. It is clean, amplifies room size and offers the right backdrop to make any furniture piece look as lovely as it can be.

My Favorite Whites

1. DKC #67, which was created at the request of abstract artist and architect Richard Meier for the whitest white possible.

2. Farrow and Ball: Pointing #2003— Farrow and Ball’s paints use rich pigments, which give a luster to the paints that change with the light in a room. I love their color Pointing (#2003) which was named after the limed pointing used in exterior brickwork.

3. Benjamin Moore: Simply White #007: At a lower price point than Donald Kaufman and Farrow and Ball, Benjamin Moore offers great whites as well. This one is described as reminiscent of “the first snowfall” and I agree wholeheartedly.