San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
RIGHT COLORS
Shackelford’s home in Alamo Farmsteads north of the Medical Center, for example, he specified 15 colors, from one called herbal escape for the lower kitchen cabinets to gray wisp for the owners suite bedroom and as an accent in Shackelford’s study.
And he set off the light muslin on most of the walls with darker beiges for the west wall of the living room and the east wall of the entryway.
“We had a wonderful first visit with him and talked of many things,” said Hall, the Texas heritage curator at the Witte Museum. “So it seemed almost like magic to receive a two-page handwritten paint schematic that combined our wishes with a subtlety and finesse that we both appreciated.”
Although the couple deviated from some of Smith’s original choices, she said they love the results and the colors chosen.
Born in Houston, Smith grew up in St. Louis, where he attended an exclusive boys school. After graduation, he attended the University of Texas at Austin where, after flunking out of the architecture school, he changed his major to art.
“Once I did that, I just thought, ‘Well, I’m going to be an artist and that’s just all there is to it,’ ” he said.
His path to becoming a color consultant included side trips as a sculptor, time spent in a commune in rural Oregon, and separate gigs as a private chef and life model in San Antonio.
He also fulfilled a long-held dream to live in New York’s Greenwich Village.
“This was in 1971, and I had decided it was time for me to come out of the closet,” he said. “And Greenwich Village was the gayest place in the world. You could walk down the street and I can promise you any person you passed was gay, unless they were cleaning apartments.”
After Smith returned to San Antonio, a friend asked him for help selecting colors for a preschool he was opening just north of downtown.
“I suggested doing something like the colorful Painted Ladies
Victorian homes in San Francisco,” he said. “Only toned down a little bit for San Antonio.”
When people began asking school officials who selected the colors, Smith quickly realized he’d found a career.
For Smith, color is like music in the way it affects one’s emotional tone.
“I do the exact same thing with people’s lives,” he said. “I add this nice background music that sets the mood of someone’s home.”
He also likes to do what he
calls “ease down” a color if a client wants something too jarring, such as a fire-engine red. This involves adding a bit of ecru or beige, gray or taupe to the color to take the edge off.
“It’s like turning down the volume a little bit,” he said. “It’s still red, but it’s more nuanced.’
For Phyllis Voltz-Creamer, who lives north of Leon
Springs, that mood is one of happiness.
“That’s what I feel every time I walk into my home,” said Voltz-Creamer, a semiretired
veterinarian. “Everything, every touch is the way I hoped it would be when I hired Jim.”
Smith gets many of his ideas from magazines. He has files stuffed with photos of rooms and color combinations he likes.
After meeting with a client and seeing their home and how they live, he’ll pull out one of these folders, perhaps marked Contemporary or Traditional, and flip through it, looking for ideas and inspiration.
“It gets the cogs turning,” he said. “It also helps to have something to show a client. If you just say, ‘We’re going with fuchsia,’ that might not mean anything to someone. But if you show them a picture, they’ll get it.”
Smith doesn’t think only about colors. He tries to make everything work together, from the furnishings to the art to the way the light enters a room at different hours of the day.
He tells the story of how, back in the ’80s, he was brought in to help select colors for the grand Victorian home that H-E-B’s Charles Butt was renovating on King William Street.
Smith knew that Butt had an impressive collection of contemporary art, but rather than make everything art-gallery white to show off the works, he painted the walls a series of pastels — pale yellows, light blues and the like.
“And then I thought, ‘You can’t have just that; it would be too boring,’ ” he said. “So I did something really attentiongrabbing and painted the dining room ceiling coral.”
Smith recently received a note from Butt that read, in part, “Hi, Jim. Today, I’ve been sitting in the dining room … with a friend for lunch. She and I have just been admiring the colors you chose nearly 40 years ago. They’re as fresh and wonderful today as they were then.”
Smith charges a minimum of $100 per hour for his consulting work, yet clients say he’s fast and efficient, so the final bill is usually very reasonable.
Pat Semmes, a retired Trinity University professor, contacted Smith shortly after moving into her new house in Olmos Park several years back. The exterior was an unflattering mix of brown wood trim and what she calls “Pepto-Bismol-pink brick.”
So Smith recommended painting the trim a taupe color. The new contrast eased the harsh pink of the brick, the way Pepto-Bismol eases an upset stomach.
“He charges less per hour than my regular decorator,” Semmes said. “His final bill was so low, I gave him a little extra.”