To paint my living room… magnolia 🥸

[Ikeasucks]

Painter comes Monday and i need to decide the colour for my largish, long and and fairly dark living room. Keeping it light and currently is antique cream (Crown) which i‘ve quite liked. Have used nutmeg white (Dulux) through a lot of the house and am considering that for the living room. Then magnolia just came to mind - are there any lovers of magnolia?

basically looking for a light colour - suggestions welcome - i do like a touch of stone or very light touch of mink

Same here. I bought an ex-rental flat and decided to live with the magnolia while considering exact shades of statement walls etc. and somewhere along the way I realised I actually liked it.

It helps that I hate grey - I find it really depressing.

My flat is magnolia with the colours in the furniture and lots of wood. It will never make a magazine unless by some weird coincidence that suddenly become stylish (unlikely) but I like it.

Also, I have family who like to keep up with the latest trends and they seem to be redecorating constantly. All power to them - they like doing it and they are spectacularly brilliant at DIY - they can buy 3 items from different DIY shops for a couple of hundred pounds and come up with something identical to a £10,000 sideboard in a design magazine (a literal example). I can’t. Staying in fashion would cost me a fortune. Magnolia may never be in fashion but I’d rather that have my home decorated in last year’s style and be clearly out of date.

Entire article on this in The Times magazine a couple of weeks ago. It's probably behind a paywall, but I'm sure you can get the idea from the headline.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/creamy-neutral-paint-colours-are-back-just-dont-call-it-magnolia-thv5hrnsq

We’re certainly not trend setters or followers OP, but can only speak from my own experience.
Our whole house is either magnolia or brilliant white (bathrooms and kitchen) and I love it. It provides a lovely neutral back drop to each room, yet each room is different. So our living room is full of oak, mahogany and green items with our travel photos on the walls.
The kids play room is full of bright coloured furniture with limited edition Disney artwork on the walls.
Our bedroom has navy blue accessories, with celestial prints on the walls.
I know if I want to switch up any rooms it’s just a case of changing some soft furnishings, rather than redecorating!
We did the whole colour on the walls thing in our last house and I found it looked tired very quickly! And I found it very restricting!

I've just used Dulux Natural Hessian in a north facing room and it's lovely.

Warmer neutrals are definitely on trend right now and perfect for darker, north facing rooms.

And I'm going to see what the difference is between magnolia and 'Natural Hessian' and I suspect not very much like a PP says!

I don't like magnolia. It looks unfinished, like it hasn't been painted. But if you like it then who cares what anyone else thinks.

Practically the same...just very slightly darker.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 me too!

If you like it, use it! Who cares about what's on trend. Others are saying use cream or an off-white instead but magnolia basically is a cream / off-white, isn't it? I like brighter and deeper colours in my own home but I'd likely not even notice someone else's wall colour unless it was particularly unusual.

Honestly all these creams are so similar. Just pick the one you like the most, and if it happens to be magnolia, so be it.

I've lived in a couple of houses that were wall to wall magnolia and honestly I really don't like it. It seems to have a yellowish undertone that makes it always look slightly grubby - almost like nicotine staining.

I do like jasmine white, but also love brilliant white walls. I painted most of the rooms in our last house brilliant white and had loads of bright colour from furniture and art on the walls, it was lovely.

If you look at the dulux chart there's an awful lot of colours that I think people would say were more acceptable for not being called magnolia, but which are pretty indistinguishable...

I mean F&B Cornforth White and Skimming Stone are basically magnolia...but one fraction of a shade darker.

I have to admit I can't see very much difference at all between Cornforth White and Skimming Stone?

I have white...it's lovely 🥰

No, people had years of it in every cheap rental, dodgy bedsit, institutional setting etc and it makes them think of anonymity, poverty and horrible landlords.

Magnolia is the colour of uncaring thrift.

Magnolia reminds me of grotty student houses, so no idea what it would like in a nicely maintained, clean property

My entire house is painted white, I bloody love it, it's clean, bright and works well as I have colourful accessories, soft furnishings etc
It looks far from sterile and is so easy to maintain and keep looking fresh.

I don't get the snobbery against magnolia. It's just a colour!! My house is magnolia. It always looks clean and fresh. I don't get how it 'sucks the light out of every room'??

I like it. Clean. We have a lot of magnolia, it's just lovely to repaint every 6 months or so to keep it clean.
Dog and kids are both ensuring that I need to have something easy to repaint lol

It’s terrible - and everyone thinks everything goes with it but actually, it has the wrong undertones to be truly neutral.

The natural hessian, comfort white and skimming stone comparisons above clearly show them to be very different colours to magnolia - so I’m confused by the ‘same-same’ comments. 😂

I hate magnolia.

I live in a rented house (although, not for long as I'm being made homeless with all my children, youngest is only 6 weeks old, landlord is an utter arsehole, but I digress) and every room is magnolia and it just makes me think of how restrictive rented houses are and the lack of freedom to decorate how you want. Everything is just sterile, boring magnolia.

People just don't understand colour. Magnolia has completely different undertones to say natural calico. But I guess if people can't see the difference then it's not going to matter to them.

I think older Magnolia's quite yellowy, but has gone more neutral - judging by the badly painted walls in our house.
We've used F&B Skimming Stone which is definitely more of a grey/beige but seems to works well in most aspects - our long living room has SE and NW windows so gets morning and evening light. It's the real stuff not a dupe so not sure if that makes a difference. It's often on 3 for 2 at the big DIY stores so not prohibitively expensive.

It does have different underones, but my understanding is different companies use different undertones and that it used to be pinker and is now yellower (or other way round) to match trends.

I totally get the rented or army accommodation panic.

I live in a rented house. It’s decorated entirely in magnolia paint from Wilko. I really like it, so much warmer than the grey/white trend and it looks beautiful when the sun shines in.

People moaning about magnolia then paint their whole house in a shade of grey complete with grey kitchen because some influencers said it was on trend