Do you have white trim? I love gray with white trim, but not so much with the medium stained trim I have in my house!

I think gray is a neutral and if you go with a warmer gray color your existing accessories will probably work.

You can try playing with room painting software like this one to find color combinations: Benjamin Moore & Sherwin Williams have similar room design tools.

Yikes. Hit the submit button by accident. The link to the room coloring software is below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Picario room painter

I have wanted to use gray for a long and could never quite pick the right chip. It looked great when I held it on the wall but looked awful when it was actually painted. What I found was that I had to warm it up quite a bit. In the paint tray on the kitchen counter with a window I added a lot of brown. In my case it was quite dark. I tried it on the wall and kept adding a little brown at a time till I got it right. The funny thing is that it still looks gray on the wall even thou if you opened the can you would swear it was a brawny tan.
I did the same thing in the bathroom. I started with a teal colour that I thought I wanted and slowly started added the same brown. When I finally got the colour I wanted I hmmed and hawed a couple of times and said the heck with it it is only paint and preceeded to go for it. The first couple of brush strokes and rolls and looked at it and went, this is green. Stuck to my guns and by the time I was finished I had the colour I was hoping for. It turned out because I was painting over a lavendar colour, until it was all painted out the lavendar was fooling the eyes into thinking the new paint was greener than it was.

Here is the picture of the gray, straight out of the can. The colour is granite. You can see that it has a very blue cast.
{{!gwi}}
Here is the same colour with the brown added. If you didn't see the two together you would probably just call it gray. An you may be able to tell that the straight gray would look awful on the picture wall and it did.
{{!gwi}}

So I think you wil be fine as long as you pick a really warm gray. The pine is on the gold side so hopefully this will give you an idea of how it might look for.

Linda

I just reread my post and realized I was actually talking about the upstairs bathroom when I said it looked green. Sorry for the mislead. I will try and get a pic of that one for you as well.I have used a lot of grayed down colours lately in all rooms.

Gray is a current cult color, it seems -- not really a fad, but out there in furniture and fabric and wall color as well. We're painting our house various shades of warm gray and we completely love it--although I want to say I started coming up with the scheme *before* gray became popular! :)

One thing about gray is that it is especially subject to change in the various lights of the day/night, so get samples up on the walls you'll be having them on to see how they'll react and if you like them the whole time. One color that is held in high regard by folks on the internet, BM Coastal Fog, turned an unfortunate dead steely color (not interesting steel) in morning light in our impossible northern area, so we went with Richmond Gray, which is almost green, instead. Not a color for everyone. The RG has made our woodwork all look SO much better than the yellow we had here before -- I don't even hate the PO's red oak cabinets in the wet bar (I'm going to change them out anyway, but it's not an assault on my eyes every day now)-- and it looks great with the white oak flooring. But we're putting a darker version of the Coastal Fog in the *southern* part of the house.

Your aqua reminds me that we're even doing a pretty grayed out light blue as an "accent wall" that wanders through several rooms -- 50% Bm Pleasant Valley -- my husband can't stop commenting on it :) Gray goes splendidly with aqua. :) Our master suite is painted in EK Pumice, which looks so light on the sample sheet but has a chameleon-like warm presence on the walls...we are blending it with an English walnut brown in furniture, reddish gold strand bamboo flooring and satin nickel fixtures (sconces over the bed).

There are so many pics of good grays on the net -- which ones are you considering?

I just went threw this with my daughter she was set on grey as the main color instead of cream and we finally settled on silver dust grey. Its light, it works with both her cool colors and the warm colors she already has. Its a valspar color though.

You're looking for a gray to tie together your reds & golds. I'm in the same boat: thinking of going pumpkin in DR & brick red in LR (or vice versa) with a grayish white trim & a warm gray in the foyer. Glad to have the suggestions to explore. I did the cool colors for 10 years & want a change.

fly, your husband is so good. Mine looked at paint samples, which admittedly tend to look brown in incandescent light, on the living room wall one night, and announced that someone is smearing feces on our wall ;) Not very encouraging!