It begins simply enough. The living room needs a new coat of paint, perhaps a fresh start for both of you. But what about something different this time? No more off-white. Maybe a colour that is bold and creative, but also educated, witty and ironic.  

There’s the high-style and pricey route, like that English company, Farrow & Ball, and its Evelyn Waugh paint names like Dead Salmon, Arsenic and Churlish Green, for US$90 for a little over three litres.  

A trip to the paint store seems as if it might help narrow the choices, too, until you stand before the wall of infinite paint shades. The feeling sinks in: the horror of the fan deck.  

Eve Ashcraft calls this anxiety the “vortex,” and she has spun it into a thriving business as a colour consultant who can, in spite of her low-key Midwestern manner, name-drop some of her clients.  

It was Ashcraft, 48, who famously helped Martha Stewart create a line of paint based on the pale blues of her chickens’ eggs. She has chosen just the right white for Steve Martin’s art collection at the San Remo, the twin-towered celebrity magnet on Central Park West, and the right gray for an Armani Casa showroom.  

For her this-not-that advice, she charges $275 an hour, with a 10-hour minimum. Her clients include “normal folks,” in addition to movie stars and other well-heeled individuals with multiple properties.  

Richard Baker, who works in private equity and lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, confessed to having one of those “paint emergencies” that leads to a call to Ashcraft (she helped steer him to the right black for Baker’s barn, though “barn” is something of a misnomer, given that it contains a pool designed by James Turrell).  

She once figured out how to make the ac tor B.D. Wong’s staircase look like a papaya. She has even helped a decorator friend choose the proper tint for her dental veneer.  

But maybe the strangest commission came from Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled “Painter of Light,” who hired her to come up with an “inspirational and wholesome” paint line drawn from his mass-produced images of fluorescent woodlands and billowing American flags. After puzzling over how to make “the glowy pink from a Holly Hobbie window something you could stand to have on your walls,” she said, she extrapolated 400 hues from it. She was well paid, she added, though the project ultimately fizzled.  

In November, she will have some new recommendations for her clients to help them through their angst. She is selling her own line of paint, Eve Ashcraft Color: The Essential Palette. She’s picked 28 colours, and a high-end manufacturer (Fine Paints of Europe) with a price tag to match (US$110 to US$130 for a two-and-a-half-litre can). She’s publishing her first book, too: “The Right Colour: Finding the Perfect Palette for Every Room in Your Home.”  

Just as a dog can hear sounds the rest of us can’t, Ashcraft seems to be able to see things that are lost on the average eye. After years of choosing paints for dingy Manhattan apartments as well as Greenwich McMansions, she knows what paints – at all price points – and what colours work best in certain settings.  

She can mask bad architecture, as she did recently for Vince Clarke and Tracy Martin, whose new Dumbo loft was the sort of conversion, said Jack Wettling, the architect they’ve hired to fix the place up, “where all the wrong things are exposed.”  

The developer’s paint job didn’t help: brown window trim, bright Sheetrock white on the walls. Ashcraft tried to describe the colour of its kitchen island: “Was it lung? Or Barbie’s arm?” Clarke (one half of the synth-pop band Erasure) and Martin will renovate next summer. In the meantime, Ashcraft chose a steel gray paint that covered a bank of windows overlooking the Manhattan Bridge, smoothing the transition from the white walls to the brown windows.  

In her book, which teases out her process in pictures and graphics, Ashcraft shows how to build a room’s palette from its furniture and artwork. Blocks of colour in a kitchen, she writes, can “turn normal kitchen clutter into interesting displays.” Her advice can be counter intuitive: In a house or apartment with serious trim, painting the trim the same colour as the walls makes a space more contemporary. Dark floors can make a space seem bigger, and sometimes white is not the best choice for poorly lighted rooms.  

“In New York apartments,” she said, “everyone wants things to be lighter and brighter. But sometimes, in a small, dark room, you have to roll with it. So what if it’s small and dark? Make it like a big cashmere ball, the cosiest room ever.”  

Ashcraft owes her business in part to the foibles of the human brain. Social scientists like to point out that human beings thrive on choice, but only up to a point. Presented with too much choice, people freeze like rabbits.  

This tendency was illustrated by the famous jam study in 1995 conducted by Sheena Iyengar, now a social psychologist and business professor at Columbia, when she was doctoral student at Stanford. In the study, Iyengar’s graduate students set out tables of jam samples in a supermarket, with six flavours offered on one, and 24 on another. Guess which table sold more jam?  

Yet paint makers keep offering us more jam.  

Two decades ago, Benjamin Moore advertised 2,000 colours. Today, its fan deck has fanned out further to nearly 3,500 colours. Fine Paints of Europe has 14,000. Martha’s line, sold at Home Depot, has 280. Ralph has more than 1,000, if you count his speciality finishes, which include one called River Rock, “which captures the subtly textured look of timeworn river rocks awash in a turbulent stream,” according to its packaging. And that can be tinted in 40 hues. Farrow & Ball has 132 colours.  

Not enough choices? Brands like Valspar, Sherwin Williams and Pratt & Lambert have extensive lines, and there are brand extensions, too, like paint from Restoration Hardware and the Guggenheim Museum (200 colours, including 50 whites and greys, in a line that started recently from Fine Paints of Europe).  

Paint lines, said Marian McEvoy, a former editor of House Beautiful and Elle Decor, have become like scented candles. Seems as if everyone has one.  

“The premise seems simple enough: A designer shade of lilac is more stylish than some random purple-ish paint,” McEvoy said recently, when asked to consider the roots of paint paralysis. “I suspect that price is key as well: not so low it seems proletariat, but not so high that it reeks of the 1 percent. If decorators keep colour-slash-shade choices down to a slow roar, I think that would help. The biggest bugaboo in choosing a colour for your living room is not listening to your own preferences, and then being bombarded with way too many options.”  

Many decorators develop their own shorthand for sorting through the brands before deciding on individual colours. Miles Redd, a Manhattan interior designer known for his bold colour choices and his high-end clientele, says that each brand has its own distinct palette. “Benjamin Moore is like Brooks Brothers,” he said. “Farrow & Ball is very Bloomsbury, all bruise and plum. Donald Kaufman” – Ashcraft’s only real competitor in the rarefied world of colour consultation – “is very Getty Museum, always anticipating the juxtaposition of art on the wall.”  

Jamie Drake, the mayor’s decorator, who famously favours hot colours like pink, orange and purple, is a Benjamin Moore loyalist.  

So is Ashcraft, whose entire apartment is covered in it. In her one-bedroom, in a prewar building overlooking a housing project in Manhattan, you can see how colour alters a space, changing proportions, bringing symmetry to asymmetrical architectural elements (or simply hiding lousy architecture), redirecting light into a room or linking disparate objects.  

So if she hits her own home with Benjamin Moore, why pay US$165 for a little over three litres for her new line? It is true that her colours are lovely, and by gum there is only one white: salt, as Ashcraft calls it.  

Ashcraft, when pressed about her paints, gives it a soft sell. “It really is ‘all that,”’ she said. “It’s like, ‘Here are the keys to the Maserati.’ I believe in the product, and any time I can use it in a job, I’m thrilled. Of course, I can’t spend that kind of money on paint for myself. But maybe they’ll give me a discount now that I have my own line?”