Thanks to everyone for your lovely comments I'm glad you all enjoyed viewing them. Atoll, I bought so long ago, it was one of my very first set of roses that I purchased at a local nursery called White Rose which is no longer running. It is very winter hardy and don't pay much attention to it. I chopped it down to the bud union and it is racing for the sky. It suffers from a mild case of powdery mildew and bs, but other than that its a bloom machine and I must say that the color is truly that bold and bright. Niecey

I just finished painting my spare bedroom putnam ivory this afternoon, and I'm not sure what to think of it... It kind of looked like flesh toned bandaids ( western exposure - setting sun). Hopefully I love it in the morning :) I've had a heck of a time choosing tan colors. Painted the kitchen & dining room BM wilmington tan one evening, and it looked awful the next day in full sunlight - like a butterscotch pudding explosion. I repainted it BM lenox tan and really like it. It's beige/tan/gold during the day and takes on a greenish cast at night which actually looks good also. Then I painted the mudroom & hallway BM shaker beige (on the same strip as lenox tan) but found it had pinkish tones in the daylight. I was thoroughly frustrated. Went back to the store and the very nice BM (Benjamin Moore) man printed out the formula for shaker beige and for 50% lenox tan. Almost identical, except the shaker beige had a tad more red tint. Went home with a gallon of 50% lenox tan and repainted the mudroom & hallway. It looks really similiar to the shaker beige but without the pinky cast in the evening. Next project to tackle - the master bedroom. Sheesh, can't wait to see what winner (not) I pick for the first coat, lol. Sorry to ramble on in your thread, but I share your pain in choosing colors :) Dawn

What seemed wrong with Pineapple Smoothie? I have sample can of that in Aura, and it is close to RH Butter but it is more vibrant - my main concern is that it would be too vibrant. Just for comparison, how does Pineapple Smoothie differ from Honeysuckle - less orange, more orange, lighter/darker, more vibrant/less vibrant? Just curious what this Honeysuckle colour is all about. The best BM match to RH Butter is actually 75% Straw. So what is RH Butter like - is it too vibrant/yellow? Birmingham Cream is in the same general family of colours, a bit more muted down and slightly more orange in the yellow than the 75% Straw. It is a strong contender. Only glitch is that Birmingham Cream does not look as good at night as the other colours (Pineapple Smoothie, 75% Straw etc.) as it is less vibrant and more dull.

I'm afraid I must disagree with the suggestion that green on the walls will tone down the brick. Actually, the opposite is true...colors that are opposites on the color wheel will bring up the color in both...so green makes orange look twice as orange, and yellow makes purple much stronger. We dealt with the same issue by painting our walls a soft neutral, and then putting a four to one mixture of water and paint in a bucket, washing it onto the brick chimney wall with a big paintbrush, and patting it down with a handful of cotton rag. This method works wonderfully to control the look, and keeps the variety among the different bricks, while tying it all into the room in a much more sophisticated way. It took one morning to do the whole thing, and gave the effect more of stone than brick. I wanted the hearth to relate to the dark floor rather than to the wall, because it keeps the brick wall from intruding visually into the room area...so I painted the inside of the firebox and the whole brick hearth flat black. Then I brushed a second coat of semi-gloss black just over the surfaces of the hearth bricks themselves, which made the whole thing settle into the floor. The grout stayed flat and shadowy, the nooks and crannies likewise, and the effect was much more natural than the dustiness of just flat black, or the fakey plasticky-ness of all semigloss. You could do the same thing with a deep tone of your carpet color. I wish I had a photo to show you. It looked wonderful, if I do say so myself!