Wall Street Journal: Where Plum Led, They Followed

Published on December 21, 2024

“We were moving from a home that was very white and bright,” said Srilakshmi Remala, “and I was ready for a departure from that.” So when the senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and her husband, Viren Kamdar, who works in wealth management, bought their family a circa-1900 craftsman house in Seattle, they sought an interior designer to help them envision life in color.

Ask Remala about her favorite hue and she emphatically states it’s green. But the team at Seattle’s Lisa Staton Architectural Interiors felt the color would compete with the site’s copious natural foliage, so they chased a different lead. Namely, the antique maps referencing the Asian spice trade and the Mughal Empire style art that the Indian-American homeowners had collected.

“We have found that by visiting a client’s closet, or looking at artwork or rugs they’ve collected, we can tease out a color palette for a whole home that will feel pleasing to them,” said Staton. In this case, the jewel tones in the couple’s art and maps stood out to the designers. They proposed a raspberry-based scheme to inform the home’s design and, when it proved too intense for the clients’ comfort, dialed it back to murkier plums and neutrals.

That scheme suited the house’s vintage. “When you work on an older home, the client is the client and that old house is also a client,” said Staton. “We wanted to maintain the original stained millwork in parts of the home and looked at [appropriate] historic color palettes.” The kitchen, for instance, called out for Benjamin Moore’s Townsend Harbor Brown. Despite its name, the paint reads plummy and complements the house’s existing mid-toned woodwork.

At first the homeowners worried that cabinets so dark would yield a gloomy kitchen. But Staton proposed light finishes elsewhere in the room, relieving their concerns. For the walls and trim, the team took inspiration from the aged paper of the couple’s antique maps and settled on Benjamin Moore Elephant Tusk, a rich ivory. Nearly matching ceramic tiles dress up the range’s backsplash and hood. “We could have added patterned tiles, but we chose to stay restrained,” said Staton. A putty-colored island and countertops in the palest of pink marble round out the mix.

One thing everyone concerned wanted to preserve? The living-room fireplace’s earthtoned Batchelder tiles. To respect these heritage ceramics, common in turn-of-the-century houses in the Pacific Northwest, the designers painted walls and ceiling in creamy beiges. Kamdar, a fan of antique rugs, selected a carpet that combined similarly warm neutrals with hints of pink and purple. But the sofas, all agreed, needed to be bolder. The choice: a rich plum even more dramatic than that of the kitchen cabinets.

In other rooms, the team used similar but not matching shades to soothing, cohesive effect. In the primary bedroom, terracotta played the role of “earthy neutral,” while the plum theme shows up as muddied pink for the fringed armchair and a murky red for the bedspread. The rug nods to all three colors.

Remala’s favorite, green, drenches the den but in decidedly dusky tints. A sofa that’s giant and welcoming enough for movie night gets purplish-brown upholstery. And the new craftsman-style oak bar is stained a medium tone to align with the original millwork.

The overall goal: colors that resonated with the couple and their two young boys. Remala recalls the moment they realized Staton had nailed the palette: When the couple walked into the completed project, they brought with them a painting purchased during a recent trip to India. The pair had bought the canvas with no consideration of their new home’s palette but quickly saw it could go anywhere. As Kamdar put it, “This house is so us.”