The feng shui master said the primary bathroom needed red, for good energy. Jane Keltner de Valle and Giancarlo Valle — designers whose new book is a parade of golden yellows, earthy reds and lush greens — didn’t want red walls. So they bought towels with red piping. Energy: restored. Contractor: never called. It’s a throwaway moment in Lane Florsheim’s cover story for the Journal’s Off Duty this weekend, and it’s the best piece of home-finance advice in the section.
The couple — she’s 47, he’s 44 — run Studio Valle de Valle, which used to be Studio Giancarlo Valle. Both were raised in color. His childhood homes, from Chicago and San Francisco to Guatemala City and Caracas, were full of hand-painted furniture and South American art; hers was an Upper East Side apartment her parents dressed in Native American art, Southwestern rugs, leopard and chintz with help from Keith Irvine, a decorator who also counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a client. They met at a Brooklyn party in 2005. Their quarrel with the all-white box is practical: try fitting a family, and a life, into a room that clean.
Maximum, medium, minimal
Their lessons come in three doses. Go all in: drench a room in deep blue or dusty rose, carpet it to match, and the color stops shouting. “If you embrace color throughout, it almost becomes a neutral,” Keltner de Valle says. A SoHo dining room went rich purple so a long pale-wood table would glow, and Hotel Esencia CEO Kevin Wendle, who feared peacock blue was too much for his library in Watch Hill, R.I., came around — then hired them again for a house in Mexico. Medium: keep each room to a short palette. The Litchfield, Conn., house they bought in August 2020 came with sponge-painted pink bedroom walls; they toned them down with Farrow & Ball’s beige Setting Plaster and let a purple bedspread, a velvet headboard and a green rug do the talking. Minimal: an accent — ceramics on a St. Barts dining ceiling, or the towels.
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This is a Housing (M6) piece dressed as a design story, and the money lesson runs from the bottom of their list up. Towels, a bedspread, a rug and a few gallons of paint are the cheapest high-impact changes a house allows — and the most reversible. A gut-renovated kitchen or a moved wall is the opposite: expensive, permanent, and often worth less to the next buyer than it cost you. Borrowing for one isn’t cheap, either. Bankrate’s 30-year fixed hit 7.40% this week, a 52-week high, and that’s the neighborhood a cash-out refinance lives in.
Bold isn’t the enemy of resale; permanence is. If you’re staying put for the long haul, the custom kitchen or the moved wall has years to earn its keep — it’s your home, not just an asset. If a sale or a downsizing into retirement is a few years out, keep the bold in the layer that leaves with you or comes off with a roller. Pay for the redo from money already set aside for it, not from the house itself. And check the forecast before you knock down a wall; the umbrella’s a lot harder to find once the drywall’s down.