By Libby White Johnston
Wood flooring professionals should always want to bring their clients’ visions to life, but what if a client’s vision involves seeing potentially hundreds of millions more colors than the average person? That was the case with a recent project for the LED Coating Solutions by Archetypal team in New York, New York. Avedis Duvenjian and Vartan Arutyunian specialize in custom color matching, but this project presented a unique challenge.
When approached with the project, Duvenjian learned that the clients’ floors had already been resanded seven or eight times during the last two years in an effort to get the color just right. While the homeowners knew exactly what they wanted, no one had been able to create the dark espresso brown color that the client wanted for the century-old maple wood floors. The floors were in a loft that used to be a clothing factory in the fashion district.
“She told me they bought this place because of the floors,” shares Duvenjian. “There had been sewing machines when it was a garment factory, so I figured right away the problem was they had been oiling those machines for 100 years. All the oil soaks into the maple floors, then the wood is not going to take color.”
The client knew all of the products that had been used previously on the floors, so Duvenjian asked what she did and did not like about them. Next, he prepared panels and brought Arutyunian with him to the loft. The floors had already been sanded back to raw wood by the prior contractors, so Duvenjian waterpopped them and made some brown samples on the floors as well. While the homeowner liked the dark brown color, she had a strong dislike of green undertones and was seeing it in the brown samples.
“The color brown is red, yellow, and blue with slightly more red and yellow. If one of these colors dominates, the undertone changes. With brown, either you’re going to see greenish or you’re going to see reddish,” explains Duvenjian. “For this client, I advanced the red and made a warm brown for her. She said she could still see green. I then added just a very small amount of red and she said it was much warmer. Vartan and I really didn’t see the difference, but she saw a huge difference.”
That’s when he began to suspect the client had extraordinarily sensitive color vision. It turned out she had no idea she was tetrachromatic.
“Usually people are trichromatic, meaning they have three cones next to their retina and they see one million colors. Tetrachromatic is when you have four cones and you are able to see 100 million colors,” he says. “In the brown samples, she was able to see the green separate undertone and the red separate undertone, so unless I was able to make a dramatic difference, she was still going to see that. If we don’t make her a little bit warmer brown, she’s not going to be happy.”
After applying the brown to the floor, Duvenjian advised the clients to look at it in the morning, afternoon, and night lighting because it would look different throughout the day. While she liked the color in the morning, she didn’t like it in the afternoon when she said it looked more grey.
“I explained to her that half of the room looked grey because the sun was hitting the white wall and the grey was a reflection of that white onto the floor. If we closed the blinds, it’s not going to be grey.”
The next day, Duvenjian says the wife was happy with the color, but then the husband said he could not live with the magenta undertone. To accommodate this concern, a turquoise tint was added over the magenta to create a neutral brown. Duvenjian blacked out the windows so the couple could see the neutral color under the light bulbs that were on the floor. He notes that by layering these coatings strategically, they were able to replicate the depth and warmth that time had created with the wood, ultimately meeting the homeowners’ expectations.
“What I learned from this was that small adjustments in the color were big for her. When making neutral colors you have to be very careful in natural lighting because daylight fluctuates different color temperatures from morning to night,” he explains. “If you are making a neutral, that neutral is never neutral. It’s better to set the color a little bit dominant. If I’m going to go warm, I go a little bit warmer so when there is a cloudy day it stays in the middle.”
“I made a point to test everything under the same kind of lighting she had in her home—high CRI bulbs set at 2,700 Kelvin. That kind of lighting shows colors more accurately and doesn’t shift much throughout the day. I explained that natural light changes constantly—from cooler in the morning to warmer in the afternoon—so if we judged the color using sunlight, it would never look the same. But under the right bulbs, the color becomes stable. That’s how we created the exact tone she could live with.”
Most importantly, Duvenjian stresses the importance of preparation and listening to the client. Adding that making real-time adjustments ensured the final result wasn’t just a technical success, but an artistic one.
“In working with this client, who possesses exceptional color perception, I emphasized the significant impact of lighting conditions on color appearance. To achieve the precise color she desired, we agreed to focus on her ambient lighting, which features high CRI bulbs at 2,700 Kelvin,” he says. “This consistent lighting allows for a stable reference point, ensuring the colors appear as intended, regardless of the time of day. This approach not only met her expectations but also provided a reliable solution to accommodate her heightened sensitivity to color variations.”