I have decorators white on many of my walls, but I also have a bunch of walls with a gray/blue/green color, so I like those cool tones. I do notice my decorators white walls look very light grey in the evening though. My kitchen cabinets are painted in BM Chantilly lace, and it looks a lot brighter and cleaner of a white than the decorators white does, so you might try that. I’m attaching a photo of my kitchen, it doesn’t show any of the decorator white walls in the kitchen, but it does show the blue on many of my walls and the Chantilly lace cabinetry. Hope that helps!

skmom: thank you so much. your kitchen is amazing. i LOVE the island! i will check out Chantilly Lace. thanks again.

Thank you! I hope it works for you too. Chantilly lace is not a warm white in my opinion, it still has a cool tone to it as well, but I think it’s much, much closer to what most people would think of as a bright, pure white than decorators white is. Whites can be really difficult to get right, and everything depends on the natural and artificial lighting in a home. Good luck with the rest of your project!

Decorator white has a blue undertone.

Simply white is an off white.

Chantilly Lace is also one I‘d say look at. Maria Killam uses that one as a control white to compare other whites to help see the undertone.

I have BM Snowfall White in my kitchen. It's very white, but a tiny bit on the warm side. Not much in the way of undertones. Make sure you are evaluating your white with the lights you will have in your finished kitchen. It makes a huge difference.

The colors of white that people think have a "blue undertone" usually belong to the green-yellow hue family and the discernible hue they're perceiving is likely more greenish than bluish but they assume it's blue because they never imagine that all colors of white belong to a hue family and very few belong to the blue hue family.

There are very few colors of white (I know of 1) that belong to the blue hue family because color measurement instruments have trouble measuring low chroma colors in the blue region of the spectrum.

If you can't measure it, you can't make it. As a result, white paint colors from the blue hue family are practically non existent in commercial paint brands. It's science.

When you know what to look for - greenishness - and then see it, you can't unsee it.

And that is often the case with Decorator's White. It belongs to the green-yellow hue family. Like I said, most whites from most brands belong to the yellow to green-yellow hue family neighborhood as you can see in this infographic.

What makes them look "just white", off-white, creamy or ivory is the amount of discernible hue also known as Chroma.

Decorator's White has a Chroma of 0.20 - that's not a lot.

Chantilly Lace has a Chroma of 0.27 and it's not that much different from Decorator's White.

Tho it seems counter intuitive, I don't think Decorator's White has enough Chroma for you. I think you need more colorfulness to work with the light you have to work with.

I would grab chips of PPG's Delicate White, SW's Extra White and BenM's Snowfall White and see how they compare to Decorator's White in your space.

St551 W, if you are trying paints from different companies, be sure to keep the names straight. There are several SW and BM names with the same words in them, and it can be hard to keep them straight.

Lori, what an interesting chart! I am surprised to see BM Snowfall White more on the green side. To me it reads a tiny bit warm, so I would have expected it to be closer to yellow.
When I was picking out my white, I went all out. I bought 10-12 samples of whites (9 of which are in the chart) and tested them at various times of day in daylight and with 5000k LEDs. I think I had 6 different data points for each white. It was fascinating to see how they changed in different light conditions. One of them looked great at almost all times but had a distinct gray tone at one point. Some looked nice and bright at times and muddy at others. It was a huge pain in the butt, but I am so glad I did it.

We had similar issue and went with BM White. It’s a very clean white that I don’t think reads cool or warm … good luck!

I am surprised to see BM Snowfall White more on the green side. To me it reads a tiny bit warm, so I would have expected it to be closer to yellow.

That makes sense. Snowfall's hue family is 1.28 so it's not that far from the end of the Yellow hue family. And if you'll noticed on the Color Wheel, it does fall on the warmer side of the green-yellow hue family.

Snowfall is actually warmer in color appearance than Simply White. If you pull the chips to compare, it's pretty easy to see.

Most people would assume that since Simply White belongs to the yellow hue family and Snowfall belongs to the green-yellow hue family that Simply White would be the warmer color but that's not how it works out.

The color temperature notations on The Color Strategist Color Wheel hold true more often than not because the warm/cool notation comes from comparing the color to all the other colors in the Munsell color system. The notation is the result of comparing a color in context of its own hue family plus several thousand other colors.

It's a more comprehensive comparison than just splitting the color wheel in half and calling one side warm and the other cool. I wrote a blog post about it here.

The theory of one side of the wheel is warm and the other is cool is more applicable to color mixing than it is to color perception. But it's the only theory about color temperature most people know.

Yeah, I think I just keep trying to simplify it, even though it's not a simple subject. I did read a lot about whites when I was making my decision, but the only thing that truly made sense to me was seeing the whites on my walls with my own eyes. Changing the temp of the lightbulbs was also very interesting. And most of my natural light in the kitchen comes from the west. Huge color differences between 6 am and 6pm! I tend to research things to death and hem and haw a lot, but it was definitely worth it for the white paint. My heart breaks when someone posts that their brand new white cabinets don't look the same as the color on the paint chip.

Hi, you ended up going with BM-Decorators White? Do you have the final photo?

We just remolded or kitchen and i went with sherman williams snowbound white. love it!