"My kids love to play this game when we're driving, asking, 'Quick: What color is that car? No, Dad, it's not orange; it's green!"
Color is a slippery business, as anyone knows who has ever flipped through dozens of cerulean swatches or poured over so many Pantone whites she goes snow-blind. Depending on lighting and context, even design professionals can lose their ability to discern gray from blue, orange from red, ivory from gardenia.
Imagine, then, the tantalizing challenge of making color a central decorating element if your client–—like roughly 8 percent of the male population of European origin–—has some form of inherited color blindness. Eric Miller, a medical-device executive who loves to surf, has deuteranopia (also known as Daltonism), which means he lacks the green retinal photoreceptors that allow most of us to quickly discern a Red Delicious from a Granny Smith. To someone with Daltonism, orange, red, and green typically
appear gold, and colors like violet, lavender, purple, and blue are virtually indistinguishable.
When Miller purchased a new, compact three-bedroom town house in the Northern Californian community of Los Gatos, friends advised him to paint the whole thing a safe, neutral shade–—“quirky” and “resale value” being mutually exclusive. His interior designer, San Francisco–based Suzette Sherman, thought otherwise. “Eric is very visual. Partly it’s his Danish/Dutch ancestry, and having grown up with great Scandinavian design,” she explains. “He wanted to inject interest and personality into what is a fairly generic house,” and create a warm and inviting place for his son, Connor, and daughter, Madison, who live with him part-time. Sherman proposed painting a vivid wall of color in each room, “in part because it’s a very economical way to make the home feel unique. And it gave the children an opportunity to customize their bedrooms.
For his first meeting with Sherman, Miller came armed with a folder stuffed with tear sheets. “At the time I had no clue that Eric saw color any differently than you or I,” the designer recalls. “The first page depicted a woman in this Zen green room. I thought he was responding to the shade of green, which we ended up applying to the kitchen, but it was more about the aura of peace and calm. The color appears to him more of what we call gold.”
Once the swatches hit the walls, it became clear that Miller perceives colors differently. “Although Eric has taught himself how to recognize certain colors using other cues, it suddenly hit me that we weren’t seeing the same thing,” Sherman says. “I didn’t understand the extent until I checked out some of the standardized tests for color blindness, and then I realized, Oh, some of these bright shades actually appear pretty conservative.”
Miller is quick to explain that he can indeed discern one color from another, even if he might not see them the same way. After a circular discussion about the difficulty of defining something one has never seen–—What is green? What is red?–—the color names end up sliding around like peas on a plate, unwilling to be impaled. Miller says, “My kids love to play this game when we’re driving, asking, ‘What color is that car? No, Dad, it’s not orange; it’s green!’”
Miller sees colors most clearly when they’re contrasted. “On their own, many colors kind of bland out,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons Suzette designed a lot of contrast into the house–—not just the paint, but things like the cherry floor, the bright cushions. I really like contrast. Without it, the color looks completely different.”
The two hues Miller sees best are blue and yellow. These appear bright and true, although without the nuances that allow for the proliferation of shades in a Benjamin Moore color wheel. The periwinkle in his bedroom, which contains red pigment, appears the same to him as the sea-blue of his bathroom and the turquoise of his son’s room. His daughter’s electric tangerine wall is more of a brownish gold. And the red downstairs bathroom tends toward brown.
Interestingly, color blindness may impart a heightened ability to discern certain shapes. One of Miller’s favorite paintings, which has a lot of contrasting blue and yellow, was done by his cousin, Mette Moller Bovin. “It’s of an island off the coast of Denmark. A lot of people assume it’s completely abstract, but I can see the subject really clearly,” Miller says. Indeed, research shows that some color-blind people may spot camouflaged objects that elude those with normal color vision.
“The cool thing is, he’s color-blind and he’s a man,” Sherman says. “In my experience, men are often afraid of bright color, and to most clients this would have been a hard sell. I wonder, if Eric could magically see it as we do, would he freak? But he went for it, knowing intellectually that these are not safe, subdued shades.”
On the kitchen sink stand two sculptural bottles of jewel-green Method soap. Did Sherman select them to play off the tiles? “Oh, no, I picked those out myself,” Miller says quickly. “I really like the shapes of the bottles–—they’re very appealing.”
