Gary Cripps If you are lucky enough to own a home with cherry wood floors, you will probably want to take advantage of every opportunity to show them off and highlight their beauty. Cherry wood is a premium hardwood from the cherry tree – yes, the same tree that grows the round red fruit!
Cherry wood is highly valued by carpenters and homeowners for its durability, smooth texture and flexibility. It is an excellent choice for flooring, but because of its rich, striking color, many homeowners find it difficult to choose a wall color.
Cherrywood assortment colour
The color of cherry wood depends on the nature of the heartwood or sapwood. The heartwood, which comes from the central core of the cherry tree, varies in color from a light reddish brown to a deep, rich red.
The plates cut from the sapwood (the softer, more permeable layer connecting the bark to the heartwood) can be creamy yellow in colour. Floors are usually made from heartwood or solid sapwood to achieve a uniform color.
Before visiting the paint booth and filling your home with paint samples, take the time to examine your floors. Would you describe them as predominantly yellow, red or brown? They are brown in the sun, but artificial light lets the red through.
Be sure to observe them under different conditions and at different times of the day. Also pay attention to the environmental factors: is the room you are painting very sunny or shady?
White
The crisp, white paint job with the sparkling cherry wood floors is a classic. You can’t go wrong with cold, shiny white paint. They usually have names like paper white, bright white or extra white. The white color of the decorator perfectly matches your cherry wood floor.
Neutral whites (e.g. pure white, solid white) are a safe but uninspiring choice. Avoid warm whites with yellow tones. They’re not against cherry wood floors, but they’re not doing anything to improve them either.
For those who have a darker wood floor and want a more beige tone, Sherwin Williams Tres Naturale may be a good choice. For more ideas on staining dark wood floors, click here.
Green
Sage green can be the perfect color for cherry wood floors. It offers enough contrast to be visually interesting.
Each soft, fresh green will bring out the beautiful reds of the wood while looking soft and inviting.
Look for nuances with names like fern, pear, pine or basil. Avoid greens with yolks like olive, lime or chartreuse.
Blue
The blue color and the cherry wood floor were made for each other. The key to using blue paint to enhance cherry wood floors is to think in terms of contrast. If you have a light-colored vase, consider a navy blue for high contrast.
The rich reddish heartwood floor can also be easily enhanced by the dark blue color. The light blue in combination with the dark wood makes a good impression and draws attention to the red of the bottom.
grey
Painting your walls grey will not distract attention from cherry wood floors, but it will not make them stand out in any way.
Keep in mind that after a few years you may notice that the color of the paint is not quite right anymore. Indeed, cherry wood darkens over time when exposed to the ultraviolet rays of natural sunlight.
Fortunately, updating the color of your walls is one of the easiest and cheapest adjustments you can make, and there’s a color to match any shade of cherry wood floor.
Colors to avoid
yellow
The yellow color is very difficult to combine with cherry wood floors. If you must have yellow walls, choose a warm, buttered yellow rather than a neutral or cool yellow.
Red
Since all cherry wood contains a certain amount of red, using red paint is a tempting but difficult undertaking. You don’t want to overload the room. One option is to paint the wall with a red accent. The colour must exactly match the red colour of the wood.
For best results, take a sample of your floor (with a perfectly identical treatment) to the refinishing table and ask for help. A dark, muted red paint can be used to bring out the reddish hue of the wood.
On the other hand, you may have noticed that the rich mahogany tones of the cherry wood outweigh the other elements of a room or a house.
The solution to an excess of red is to use red paint only as an accent color. Another option, perhaps counterintuitive, is to add more red – especially terracotta. The introduction of the terracotta color will reduce the volume of the base of the red cherry.
What are your favorite colors for cherry wood floors? Let us know in the comments below. For more information, see our page on colors to match red oak floors.
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