Venus Williams Uses This Dramatic Paint Color on Repeat

The tennis court isn’t the only place where Venus Williams gives her all—she won’t settle for anything less than 100% at the paint store either. “I like to push myself, even [with] colors,” she says. Her love for interior design is what ultimately inspired her to start her firm, V Starr, back in 2002, and more recently cofound AI-powered home-visualization tool Palazzo. With the help of Palazzo’s chatbot, users can upload a photo of their space and get a sense of what it would look like with completely different finishes and furniture, including the HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams 2025 Color Collection of the Year. “We’ve all seen folks make the wrong choice, where they don’t like the color of their wall,” says Williams. “We know colors are very important.”

The just-announced assortment of trending paint colors spans 10 hues, including HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams’s number one pick for next year: Quietude. Ahead, we asked the tennis champion–turned–design aficionado what she thinks about the cool sage green, plus her go-to color for upping the drama in a room.

The Trending Color She Can Get Behind

The sage green craze isn’t over yet. As someone whose personal life is just as busy as their professional one, we can’t blame Williams for sticking by it. “This color is quite calming, quite soothing, quite regenerative,” she says. “If you want to walk into your bedroom or come home from work and feel like that, then this is the color to use.”

The Dramatic Color She’d Put in Any Room

True blacks like Tricorn Black have easily become Williams’s go-to for bringing drama to a space. “It’s been my favorite for years,” she says, adding how a room drenched in black can have a powerful, surprising impact. “I’ve had a black bedroom, I’ve had a black headboard, you can use it on your windows—I’m constantly playing with this color.” You just won’t find her with a brush in hand as it’s happening. “I’ve never gone the DIY route because I know I’ll end up falling off a ladder,” she says.

The Paint Mistake She Won’t Make Again

In the very first house Williams shared with her tennis star sister, Serena, she remembers making an all-too-common paint mistake. They chose the wrong shade of white. “We all need a good white, and there are a lot of whites, so it’s like, which white?” says Williams. While it wasn’t obvious right after the walls were painted, they noticed how every surface looked a little bit pink once they started bringing furniture inside. They eventually learned that the amount of sunlight, and even the colors of the landscape outside, can change the way a white reads.

With a lot of trial and error, they finally found a swatch that looked truly white. Snowbound, one of the hues in the HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams 2024 collection, is a creamy option that could easily skew a bit blush, so if you want it to read more crisp, pair it with cool grays, beiges, and taupes.