Designers' Favorite Sage Green Spaces + Their Exact Paint Shades

The Paint: Quietude, HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams

The design landscape has gone decidedly green in recent years, and verdant palettes of all kinds — from energetic shades that evoke the first bright shoots of spring to moodier hues recalling shade-dappled ferns and fog-shrouded groves — are growing more and more popular. Interior experts have developed a particular taste for sage, a gently muted green with silvery-gray undertones, and it’s easy to see why.

“The softness of sage green helps reduce stress and induce relaxation. Homes serve as sanctuaries to counter outside stressors, and consumers and interior designers are looking to infuse interiors with textures and colors that inspire calm and peace,” explains Ashley Banbury, color marketing manager at HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams. “Sage green offers a chance to style our homes to cultivate a feeling and a sense of longevity. Softened colors that provide subtle contrast, like sage green, can be seamlessly incorporated into a variety of existing home aesthetics for years to come.” (Paired here with rich green accents and toasty organic decor, the serene sage on this bedroom’s paneled walls is Quietude, the brand’s Color of the Year for 2025.) We’ve got designer-approved, sage-forward recipes for every room. Come on in and find one that suits your taste.

The Paint: Quietude, HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams

Take a second look at Quietude and consider how beautifully it contrasts with terra cotta tile, stacked stone and creamy trim. “Sage green provides the perfect backdrop for a variety of home settings or can serve as the star of any space when contrasting with brighter neutrals,” Banbury says. A sage green front door cultivates curb appeal paired with warm, off-white siding — and it’ll stand the test of time. “Quietude embraces both traditional and modern elements, equipping the hue with true staying power,” she adds.

The Paint: Green Onyx, Sherwin-Williams

Looking to bring an old-school green to a classic bungalow like this one? Draw inspiration from Atlanta designer Micaela Quinton, who chose a tawny sage that would have felt right at home in the same space a century ago. “For my clients’ 1920s home, I had in mind a color that felt historic and modern,” she told HGTV Magazine. “This green delivers! Popular in that era, it looks like copper patina, yet next to the dark hood and brass accents, it’s fresh and spring-y.”

The Paint: Highland, Portola Paints

In her own contemporary kitchen, Los Angeles designer Laurie March paired pale herringbone floors, crisp black hardware and deliciously textural soapstone countertops with dimensional sage lower cabinets. Skipping upper cabinets on this wall and letting a generous view of her garden take center stage, she acted on the same instincts floral designers have when working with sage. “When designing floral arrangements, we like to pair sage leaves with pastel colors and dusty whites,” says Eka Dara, founder of Edelweiss Floral Atelier in Brooklyn, New York. “The soft, velvety texture of the leaves brings softness and warmth to pale, icy tones. Sage leaves also give great dimension and texture to darker, moody arrangements, creating contrast.”

The Paint: Highland, Portola Paints

On her kitchen’s opposite wall, March demonstrates again how sage’s role in a floral bouquet translates to storage framing a pale hood, moody backsplash and statement range. Here, the cabinets’ neutral, balanced tone and minimalistic hardware let the range’s rich finishes and the sculptural strainers, hung against the backsplash, catch the eye. To really drive home the love of sage green, Laurie included strips of sage on the pot rack above the range.

The Paint: Green Smoke, Farrow & Ball

If you’re itching to experiment with a painted ceiling and have a paneled space, like this one, try brushing on a darker sage with sooty gray undertones. “Sage green is a cozy, calming color for a bedroom,” Dara says. If the room you’re revamping has exterior access, all the better. “It’s a great way to connect your interior to outside nature in a sunroom, or to uplift a wood-heavy room.”

The Paint: Treron, Farrow & Ball

Iterations of sage also make frequent appearances in Fixer to Fabulous host Jenny Marrs’ kitchen designs — and Farrow & Ball’s Treron is a perennial favorite. A dusky, traditionally mid-tone version of the hue picks out handsome details on the dimensional cabinets and range hood she chose for this transitional kitchen. It also complements organic elements like the subtle veining in the backsplash’s marble subway tiles and the floating shelves’ understated grain.

The Paint: Green Smoke, Farrow & Ball

Creeping like a low-lying fog across the kitchen cabinets in the 200-year-old villa Jenny and Dave Marrs renovated for their friends in Chianti, Italy, sage green paint turns down the temperature on warm, Old World elements like the spectacular, exposed-beam ceiling, herringbone terra cotta flooring, antique island and window casements. As an echo of the olive leaves in the landscape beyond those windows, sage is an intuitive accent here — and its barely-there blue undertone helps the eye transition between the pale walls and black appliances.

The Paint: Vintage Vogue, Benjamin Moore

Developed with deep undertones that make it an unexpectedly stylish swap-in for blacks and browns, this darker sage infuses the bourbon room at the Marrs’ built-in-the-1880s Welcome Inn vacation rental with undeniable atmosphere. Use a hue like this one to draw the eye to luxe details like the sconces’ brass hardware, the club chairs’ cozy leather and the intricate rust-based pattern on the area rug.

The Paint: Blue Gray, Farrow & Ball

Sage’s chameleonic qualities are on full display in the principal suite Jenny and Dave Marrs renovated on Rock the Block. South Carolina sunlight splashes across newly installed hardwood flooring and tips the paint’s blue, green and black pigments into much warmer territory. Think of the abundance of blue in this paint as a starting point for your palette, then skew sage by layering in natural materials and throwing the windows wide open.

The Paint: Sea Salt, Sherwin-Williams

Good Bones’s Karen E Laine and Mina Starsiak Hawk chose a coastal sage to carry like a breeze through this eclectic Indianapolis home’s first floor. The whisper of blue in this muted color compounds the high ceilings’ sense of spaciousness and complements the front door and glass-fronted bar cabinet’s darker stains. Sure, a forgettable gray paint could make the same transition, but where’s the organic appeal in that?

The Paint: Sea Salt, Sherwin-Williams

Karen and Mina carried that same coastal sage into the home’s dining area and kitchen, where it offers stylish support for two gallery-style arrays and transitions smoothly to a gray-white tile backsplash that carries all the way to the ceiling. Because the sage is so pale, the crossover to the kitchen is detectable and graceful all at once.

The Paint: Country Tweed, Sherwin-Williams

Home Town’s Erin Napier just might be HGTV’s Queen of Green. Sages in particular are key players in the eclectic spaces she creates in Laurel, Mississippi, homes — as in this contemporary cottage kitchen, where an especially earthy tone goes green against white trim and an off-white wall. Here, the contrasting color between the kitchen counters and the home’s living and dining area creates a neutral-yet-notable visual boundary between those areas.

The Paint: Evergreen Fog, Sherwin-Williams

Erin created cohesion in this cozy breakfast room and kitchen by accenting the former with Sherwin-Williams’ Rosemary, a sage that’s tipped over into forest green, and grounding the latter with kitchen cabinets in ultra-versatile Evergreen Fog, a paler, traditional sage that suits warm butcher-block countertops especially well. She then layered in yet another green by repurposing a well-worn worktable as a kitchen island, which features a patchy patina that is a half-step between the two greens and ties in beautifully with all that refinished wood.

The Paint: Create, Sherwin-Williams

A delicate sage sets the mood in this neutral guest bedroom, where Erin Napier paired botanical prints with off-white floral bed linens and an embroidered accent pillow that emphasizes the walls’ barely-there green. The walls’ creamy undertone complements both the warm, translucent window treatments and the vintage bedstead’s earthy beige paint. A sage like this one brings a room to life without compromising its serenity.

The Paint: Creekside Green, Benjamin Moore

Erin added subtle texture and character to this cottage kitchen by brushing its horizontal beadboard with a sage green that’s very nearly gray. That tone creates the perfect backdrop for the iron pipes on the wall-mounted industrial floating shelves and the gray color she chose for the pantry doors. It also layers well with the striated, hexagonal stone tiles selected for the kitchen floor.

The Paint: Retreat, Sherwin-Williams

Designer Brian Patrick Flynn dissolved the boundary between forest and foyer in the HGTV Dream Home 2022 foyer, where sage green paint on the entryway’s ski-locker-style, integrated storage and seating pulls in tones from the home’s sylvan setting in Warren, Vermont. This sage’s blue-gray undertones lend the space a freshness that feels both appropriately outdoorsy and crisply contemporary all at once.

The Paint: Retreat, Sherwin-Williams

The same sage plays a very different role in the home’s spa-like main bath, a coolly color-blocked chamber where hunter green hex tiles in the expansive shower give way to misty green on the two walls and ceiling surrounding the sculptural tub. This takes forest bathing to a whole new level.

The Paint: Jade Romanesque, Benjamin Moore

Georgia-based designer James Farmer brought his signature traditional maximalism to this family retreat by wrapping the kitchen with a charismatic sage that feels Old World and woodsy all at once. (Can we talk about how satisfyingly the sage on the range hood frames the duck-spangled canvas he hung against it?) Use an all-enveloping green as the foundation for an array of warm, mismatched pieces, like with the knotty pine island, dining table and chairs, which Farmer chose here.

The Paint: Calke Green, Farrow & Ball

This versatile, historic sage feels sunny in a breakfast room (where it was originally used in the 19th-century) and downright mysterious in a powder room. Houston designer Mary Patton carried succulent color up the wall and across the ceiling in this diminutive space to make the most of its impact against pieces like the sleek pedestal sink and half-framed vanity mirror. Follow her lead and deploy sage in a low-light space that can skew a bit moody.