There’s nothing I love writing about more than paint. (No, seriously! I’ve written a lot about paint. Don’t believe me? Check out this compendium of the 100 best-ever paint colors , or this story about the paint colors you’ll never regret , or this one about the white paint colors designers swear by . I could go on.) So it should come as no surprise that I’m often thinking about paint and the power it holds over our homes.

Recently, I was helping a friend pick a color for her house when she said she didn’t care so much about the shade, but that she didn’t want it to look “cheap,” which got me thinking: are there shades that inherently look cheaper than others? Sure, I—a noted hater of builder-grade gray—might say that a cool gray paint color cheapens a room, but there had to be ot

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