here is my River Gorge Gray in our LR in matte. I love the color and and our room has a ton of light.

Have you considered a gold? A gold color might look good with your painting, your rug, your reds and your beautiful kitchen.

Renee

Thanks, ruf! I like the way that color looks.

hose, I started out looking at golds, but with my trim color, none of them looked great. I have SW Blonde in the adjacent living room, so one option I thought of was to stick with that theme and just go a little darker, but I wasn't loving it when I looked at samples. Plus, I wasn't thrilled about using essentially the same color as the LR.

For whatever reason, this room wants to be some variety of green. I like that the River Gorge is "less green" than what I have.

There's that art piece that I love so much!

Thanks, ttodd!

Happened across this thread and saw your comment to me...LOL! I wish GW had emoticons. Picture a smiley face here. I would never say, "I told you so," because colors on monitors and in photographs can be so misleading, but I'm happy that you are considering other choices.

I see where you're going with your color. I did much the same in my living room a year ago. I had BM Baby Turtle, a wonderful mossy color with brown undertones, but wanted to go softer, grayer. I finally painted with Martha Stewart's Mourning Dove, (Home Depot) mixed up in Ace flat matte paint. I really like the change. I tested River Gorge Gray in the living room, since I had just successfully repainted in my formerly red kitchen. It was too dark for my very low-light living room, thus the Mourning Dove. But in the kitchen, I love it. My granite is Tropical Brown, but my floor tiles and my tumbled stone backsplash are golden in tone. I'm including a link to my photos on Picturetrail. Click on the thumbnails on left and each shot is bigger. Lighting wasn't wonderful on picture day, but with all the shots, I hope you get the idea. The shot with the dog in front of the chair by the kitchen window is super accurate in regards to color.

And I really thought I was getting away from the green in my house, (even Northampton Putty in my DR and Alexandria Beige in my master bath turned out to have green undertones) but the River Gorge has green underneath, though the feel is still gray.

Red

Here is a link that might be useful: Red's Kitchen in River Gorge by Benjamin Moore

I've moved things around a bit since this photo, but I'm standing at the stove taking the picture towards the window and floor-to-ceiling cabinet wall.

Red

Man I love those curtains Red!

Thanks, Red. I do really like that color. It was sort of my first instinct -- saw it in my 5" x 8" sample and thought, "Yum." But worried that it was too dark. Still unsure. But in my obsession, I went to the BM web site and looked at colors they suggest to coordinate with Natural Wicker, and one was Kingsport Gray, which is even darker and much more brown. But I looked up some images of it and I thought, Hmmmm.... Wonder if I could try it at 25% or something.

I am going to the paint store today to get sample jars (so I can make bigger sample boards) of River Gorge Gray, Sag Harbor Gray (an underdog that has moved up), Herbal Escape, and maybe that Kingsport Gray.

My one concern with a darker color is not that the room will be dark, because during the day we get a ton of light, and at night I do like "cozy," but that we might get a "striped" effect in areas like this:

So we have a run of cabinets, then a little section of wall, then the fridge, then a little section of wall. I keep looking at this area and wondering if it's going to look too choppy with a darker color. Or maybe I'm just going crazy overthinking it.

Looking at the pic below, it's easy to see why the men in my house are saying "But they're all the same color!" That's River Gorge on the top, Sag Harbor on the left, and Herbal Escape on the right.

Any one of those grays should be lovely with your white cabs! I actually had a toile fabric that I had bought to make my drapes and was furiously testing paint samples to work with the toile. Got it painted and threw the toile over my rod--looked too wimpy for the kitchen. After two solid weeks of paint sampling, I actually drove to JoAnn's fabrics 5 min away and bought this fabric you see. Craigslisted the toile.

Red