NEW paint and hardware technologies, but moreso changing tastes, have seen an eruption of colours across Kingston and St Andrew, and the new and emerging boastful hues are slowly replacing the pristine whites and subdued creams that home owners once favoured.

Nowadays, keeping up with the Joneses means shrouding exterior walls with an unusual hue of paint, customised to a desired mood or tone.

Five years ago, Berger Paints Limited – a top paintmaker in Jamaica – was manufacturing 950 standard and special colours, according to Paul Alexander, marketing manager.

But now, with changing consumer preferences and evolving trends in home decor, the paintmaker is now marketing some 5,000 colours.

“A lot of people still prefer off-whites, but driving through Kingston, parts of Mandeville and Montego Bay, you can see that there has been a definite change,” said Alexander.

Five years ago, colour paint was also significantly more expensive than white and tones of white, but as the demand for assorted hues grew, higher volume production has resulted in cheaper shelf prices.

Now the prices tend to equate.

Brightly painted homes are not new in Jamaica – the countryside, coastal resorts, and inner-city communities have always sported assorted hues.

Upscale and middle income homes, and some commercial complexes, are simply catching up.

“I remember growing up in Vineyard Town,” says Senator Anthony Johnson, a historian and lecturer at the University of the West Indies.

“If someone had a house that wasn’t painted white or blue, or so, then they were looked at as funny. Even grey was a normal colour then.”

Vineyard Town is largely a middle to lower-middle income neighbourhood, located on the edge of downtown and next door to the volatile lower section of Mountain View Avenue.

Now, yellow and orange in all their variations have suddenly become staples in new and reworked residential and commercial structures.

So have different hues of green, pink, blue, and tones of red.

“The revolution is there, and the psychology of colours has finally come into play,” says interior designer and installer Stewart Isaacs.

Isaacs, who has been in the business for 15 years, designs colour palettes for new buildings, as well as old structures requiring a facelift.

The new blaze of colours are more evident in the upper-income neighbourhoods. Some persons, however, are yet to be fully caught up in the revolution and have colourised their fences or boundary walls only – like the green and yellow wall at Norbrook, and the peach wall that fronts the gated Norbrook Meadows/Estate.

Johnson, whose book Kingston: Portrait of a City, chronicles economic and social changes that shaped Kingston from it’s foundation as an active 18th Century port to the present day capital, recalls the look of the city as it evolved.

“Then houses were largely made of wood, so paint was used as a means of preserving them,” said Johnson.

“White paint was a favourite because everybody liked it and it was also the cheapest available. If you had a house that was painted a different kind of colour then it showed that you had spent money on getting that special kind of paint.”

Having moved from Vineyard Town with a family of his own years ago, Johnson’s house sports a sunny canary yellow exterior, with different tones in assorted rooms throughout the interior.

“If I had this colour on my walls years ago and invite someone in,” he said, pointing to his grey-cobalt blue study, “they would have thought I was some kind of artist or something, but now it’s not so strange anymore . even the colour on the outside, I tend to prefer just plain white myself but my wife chose it and she and her friends seem to love it,” he said.

The development of a mass market for colours has banished some of the monetary concerns about price.

At Rapid True Value, for example, a popular hardware chain in Kingston, Berger’s fiesta red, in its 303 line, retails for the same price as its bone white – over $1,000 per tin.

And the technology now allows any homeowner to walk into a local hardware store and mix up any shade, but the customised service often comes at a higher price.

“Yes, people are now taking more risks because of our interactive software that works along with our colour world spectrum,” says Kelly Ann Wilson, colour consultant at Berger Paints, who spends her time meeting with homeowners, developers and architects.

“It’s become easier now to take a risk with colour because of the technology available. Mixing has improved, so it has taken off .”

Architect Michael Gyles, responsible for a variety of residential and commercial properties, including the predominantly yellow and blue reworked Liguanea Post Office and Shopping Centre on Hope Road, St Andrew, says his clients don’t usually request brighter colours, but once given licence to dictate the exterior aesthetics of his projects, he tends to go with vibrant tones.

“I think it’s a trend now,” said Gyles.

The architect works with colour consultants as well as mixes his own hues based off the “millions” of colours available in computer drawing programs, when designing buildings.

“Paint companies, I find, are into colour charts and pushing brighter colours, so I don’t really use standard colour charts any more. It still costs a little more because they have to mix it for you but you can basically get what you want now a little easier,” Gyles told the Sunday Observer.

“I think the public is coming to more accept those sort of colours now than they did in the past.”

In downtown homes, where colours first emerged, it was a cheap means of decoration, in contrast, said Gyles and Johnson, to the suburban use of decorative stones and moldings.

“Colour is one of the cheapest forms of decoration. If you look outside Jamaica people tend to use stone, marble, granite, etc, as a form of décor on the outside of buildings, but here only the rich can afford to do that,” said Gyles.

“Older Jamaican buildings used to use moldings… those were expensive and that was their form of decoration on the outside, but the poor man couldn’t afford to do that sort of thing.”

As an interior designer, Isaacs’ adoption of colour was more about new expressions, rather than economics.

“We were just sick of the monochrome – that type of serene, sober environment for the workplace was just not cutting it,” said Isaacs.

“These changes are not synonymous with Jamaica alone. It is an international movement.”

barrettr@jamaicaobserver.com