Forty years of painting Park City, one trend at a time.

People ask us what is trendy right now, and we always laugh a little before we answer. We have been painting houses in this valley since the eighties. We have watched the same living room get painted four different ways for four different owners, and every single time the homeowner was sure their color was the timeless one. They were all right, for about ten years.

So here is the honest tour. Four decades of what Park City wanted on its walls, what we thought of it at the time, and what we actually believe after doing this for as long as we have.

1985: wallpaper, and a lot of mauve

When we started, half our work was hanging wallpaper, not painting over it. Floral borders near the ceiling. That dusty pinkish purple nobody can name anymore but everybody recognizes. Mauve was on walls, in carpet, on the bathroom fixtures if the budget was big enough. It felt rich at the time. Warm. A little formal.

We do not miss steaming wallpaper off a wall in a house at 7,000 feet, but we will say this for the eighties: people were not afraid of warmth. Everything since has been a slow argument about how warm a room is allowed to be, and the eighties just said yes.

1990s: hunter green and a wall of oak

Then the greens came in. Deep hunter green, the kind you saw on a Range Rover, paired with honey oak everywhere it could fit. Cabinets, trim, the entertainment center that took up an entire wall. We stained a lot of oak in the nineties. A lot.

Park City was changing fast around then. The resorts were growing, the second homes were getting bigger, and people wanted their mountain place to look like a lodge. Green and oak did that. It has mostly aged out, but every few years a client asks for a deep green study or a green powder room, and honestly, done right, it still looks great. Green never fully left. It just learned some manners.

2000s: Tuscan gold and the age of the faux finish

The two-thousands were the glaze years. Suddenly every great room wanted to look like a villa in Tuscany, which is a funny thing to want in a ski town, but we were not going to argue with a paying client. Ochre walls. Rag-rolled and sponged finishes. Faux texture that took us three times as long as a flat coat and cost accordingly.

We got good at it. Layering glaze so it reads like old plaster is a real skill, and there are houses up here we finished twenty years ago that still look intentional. But the faux trend taught us something we still believe: the more a finish tries to imitate age, the faster it dates itself. The honest finishes last longer, every time.

2010s: gray, gray, and a little more gray

Then the pendulum swung all the way to the other side. Out went the warmth, in came the cool grays. Open floor plans, white-on-white kitchens, that one greige everybody used. We could have painted half the valley in the same three Sherwin-Williams grays and nobody would have noticed the repeat.

We understood it. After a decade of gold glaze, a clean gray felt like opening a window. But cool gray is a hard color in the mountains. Our light up here is sharp and a little blue already, and a cool gray wall can go flat and cold by four in the afternoon in January. We spent that whole decade nudging clients toward the warmer end of gray, and the ones who listened are still happy.

2025: mountain modern, and warmth comes home

Which brings us to now. The grays are on their way out and warmth is back, but it is a quieter warmth than the eighties. Soft whites like Benjamin Moore White Dove instead of stark white. Deep, smoky greens like Vintage Vogue on a single accent wall or a built-in. Brown is back too, real brown, on beams and library shelving and trim. Earth tones that sit right next to timber and stone instead of fighting them.

This is the first trend in a while that actually suits where we live. A warm white great room with a deep green accent and walnut trim looks like the mountains, not like a magazine someone flew in from somewhere else. We are painting a lot of it right now, and for once we are not biting our tongues about the color choices.

So what is next?

Here is the part people do not want to hear. We do not know, and neither does anyone selling you a color of the year. What we do know is that every one of these trends looked permanent from the inside, and every one of them turned over in about a decade.

So when someone asks us what to paint, we do not steer them toward whatever is hot. We ask what they actually like, we test it on their wall in their light, and we make sure the prep underneath is done right so the finish lasts however long they want to live with it. A color you chose because you love it ages better than a color you chose because a magazine told you to, because you do not resent it when the trend moves on.

We can paint it like it is 1985 if that is what your house wants. We can paint it like it is today. After forty years, the trend was never really the point. The point was doing the work well enough that the room still looks good long after the trend that inspired it has come and gone.