<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"When Joseph Montebello and Ron Leal bought a weekend house in northwestern Connecticut, the wood floors were an all-too-predictable shade of brown. &amp;quot;It was a lot of one color to look at,&amp;quot; Montebello recalls. So they asked their contractor to make the floors a little lighter. He bleached them. And then he bleached them again. &amp;quot;Each weekend,&amp;quot; Montebello remembers, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;d look at the floors and we&amp;#039;d tell him they weren&amp;#039;t light enough. Finally, we came up one weekend and found that he had just painted all the floors white.&amp;quot;   And painted white they have remained. The snowy floors set the tone for the house, which has been expanded twice: The men enlarged the kitchen about eight years ago and the master-bedroom wing in 2008. (The house has been the couple&amp;#039;s full-time residence since 2004, when Montebello, the former creative director of HarperCollins Publishers, and Leal, a fashion designer, both retired from full-time employment.) In fact, every important surface in the house is exactly the same color: Benjamin Moore Icicle (semigloss on floors and woodwork, flat on walls and ceilings).  Unlike brown, white never seems like too much of one color. Among the reasons, Montebello says, is that a single can of paint can produce countless shades of white. The variables are how light hits the paint\u2014which can change from minute to minute\u2014and which objects the paint reflects. Then, too, white provides a crisp background, ensuring that art and furniture never simply blend into the woodwork. Against a white backdrop, says Montebello, &amp;quot;whatever elements you introduce into a room become important.&amp;quot;  The house contains plenty of colorful elements, including more than 4,000 books. Many are in the dining room which the couple designed with floor-to-ceiling shelves that would turn book jackets into a kind of striped wallpaper. The height of the shelves\u2014just a drop more than the 9\u00BD inches of most hardcovers\u2014ensures that the &amp;quot;wallpaper&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#039;t have too many gaps. Just for the record, the books also get read: Montebello interviews authors for a radio and cable TV show called Between the Covers and writes about them for a local magazine. With the books forming a colorful enclosure, the room doesn&amp;#039;t have a single artwork hanging on the walls, and it doesn&amp;#039;t need one.  It&amp;#039;s a little different in the living room (this spread), where the art is in frames, not jackets. One wall showcases a dozen illustrations by George Goursat (aka SEM), best known for caricaturing Paris in the 1920s. The prints&amp;#039; parchment color sets the tone for the room&amp;#039;s furniture, including a shagreen Parsons table by Karl Springer on the back wall and upholstered pieces in a (narrow) range of beiges.  Like all the photos in the house\u2014from a collection ranging from Lartigue to Annie Liebowitz\u2014the rotating pair on the mantel demonstrates the power of black against white. The owners obviously have a thing for contrast: This is the rare Connecticut house where zebra stripe, not chintz, is the decorative pattern of choice. But most of its architectural elements, including the substantial mantelpiece and the traditional eight-over-eight, double-hung windows, are unadorned. All the old windows were replaced with energy-saving modern units by Marvin.   When the men bought the house, it was a simple 1950s Cape with small rooms on both levels. They loved the place for its location, in walking distance of Litchfield, one of Connecticut&amp;#039;s most picturesque historic villages, but on a flag lot\u2014which means it is set far back from the street. As a bonus, a brook traverses the backyard.  The first thing the new owners did was add an 18-by-23-foot kitchen, where Leal, a gifted chef, presides. The beige kitchen cabinets and backsplash tiles complement the ever-present white. And the granite-topped island (7 feet by 9 feet) adds bits of gray to the mix. The beadboard in the cabinet fronts (which creates a kind of syncopation) adds visual interest, as does the shock of the dark antique Chinese table.  The men designed the kitchen to be spacious, but they didn&amp;#039;t want it to be the only room their guests spent time in. In fact, they made sure there were no stools around the island, so people wouldn&amp;#039;t linger. No matter, Leal reports. &amp;quot;Everyone just stands.&amp;quot; But on formal occasions, drinks are in one room, dinner in another, and coffee in a third, necessitating a civilized procession through an all-white realm. (It helps that the double doors between the rooms were removed.)  And when the guests leave? Montebello says that maintaining the house is easy\u2014even the floors, he says, require nothing more than a wet mop and some Murphy Oil Soap. But he admits, &amp;quot;We have several cans of Icicle in our garage. I&amp;#039;m constantly walking around the house with a paintbrush.&amp;quot;  The second major addition to the house is entirely dedicated to a master-bedroom suite, a favorite hangout of the couple&amp;#039;s matching West Highland terriers, sisters Cate and Maggie.  Kate Briggs Johnson, an architect based in Norfolk, Connecticut, helped the men design the new wing. Her clients, she says, &amp;quot;were looking for a large-scale bedroom in a small-scale house.&amp;quot; She provided it by creating a wide-open space but using the vocabulary of the original building.  At one end of the bedroom, Montebello works at a Window table conceived by Manhattan designer Vicente Wolf (it&amp;#039;s made of lime-rubbed oak). Montebello edited Wolf&amp;#039;s 2002 book Learning to See, and he says he picked up plenty of ideas from it. For one thing, Montebello and Leal\u2014following Wolf&amp;#039;s example\u2014lean their photos against the walls instead of hanging them. That way, says Montebello, you can move them around, although, he adds, &amp;quot;we never do.&amp;quot;    From Wolf, Montebello says he also learned &amp;quot;how to mix styles that I would not otherwise have thought of mixing. He&amp;#039;ll have a carved African stool next to a midcentury table, and if you look at how he does it, it all seems effortless.&amp;quot; His own mix, which includes faux-bamboo wooden chairs and a decorative obelisk from England, proves Wolf&amp;#039;s point. The pieces&amp;#039; strong silhouettes pop against the white background.  Like the old parts of the house, the addition is defined by its white floors. In spring, summer and fall, they separate the house from the landscape, creating an island of urbanity in a rural setting. And when there&amp;#039;s snow on the ground outside, the floors become part of a sea of white that appears to go on forever. What the Pros Know The kitchen &amp;quot;is no different from any other room in the house,&amp;quot; says Leal. By which he means: It&amp;#039;s white. But not exclusively. &amp;quot;What happened,&amp;quot; Leal says, &amp;quot;is that we went to the quarry and picked out the granite for the countertops, but when we brought it back, we realized it had so much beige and gray. The white floors were okay. And the appliances picked up the steel color in the granite. But if the cabinets had been pure white, the countertops would have looked too heavy.&amp;quot; To avoid that imbalance, the men settled on beige for the cabinets, which, Leal says, softened the look of the granite. It also taught the men a lesson in how colors are perceived. In the mornings, Leal relates, you can see the difference between the white and the beige. But in the afternoons, when the sun moves to the other side of the house, there&amp;#039;s a period &amp;quot;when the whole room becomes one color.&amp;quot; In other words, just as bright light can make many colors out of one, softer light can make one out of many. Click here to see the resources. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/home-remodeling-renovating/home-makeovers/a3867/the-classically-white-palette-a-53085/>