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Rosie was asleep on the sofa, and who could blame her?

After all, the walls of the little office were painted Magnolia—one of many colors available from Ellen Kennon’s Full Spectrum Paints. Magnolia is a blue-green billed as “restful” and “soothing.” Rosie, Kennon’s daughter’s amiable little pooch, was no match.

The products have an effect on humans too, though it’s not quite narcolepsy: A room done in full spectrum paints, is a visual revelation. The color isn’t so much on the walls as infusing them, giving them depth and changing depending on light conditions.

It’s all about the pigments. Kennon’s paints use all seven pigments of the spectrum excluding black, which absorbs light and produces a flat look. Standard paints use only two or three pigments, including black. Kennon’s colors jump off the wall by comparison.

“Some colors you notice it more than others, like the Gustavian Grey really shifts a lot in color from a green to a blue,” she says. “I try to do that with all of them, but some just happen to do it more than others, and quite frankly I’m not sure why.”

Kennon launched her paint company on the summer solstice six years ago, long after she’d already established herself as a professional interior designer, first in New Orleans then in New York, where she spent a year as head of the interiors department for Peter Marino Architects—designer to Calvin Klein, Yves St. Laurent, Valentino and others.

She also worked in Paris, but it was in New York where she discovered full spectrum paint on the walls of a friend’s apartment. All the walls were painted the same color, but looked different in different rooms. Kennon’s friend told her about artist and color guru Donald Kaufman, father of full spectrum house paint, who Kennon eventually hired to create colors for her clients.

Kennon, a Lake Charles native, returned from the big city for the bucolic charm of St. Francisville 17 years ago. Born with an eye for color, she designed her first room at 10. As a professional designer, Kennon created the colors she needed instead of relying on off-the-shelf stuff. Back in Louisiana, her colors were a hit with clients.

“They always kept coming back to my colors and they’d say, ‘You should have your own line,’” Kennon says. “I thought if I’m going to do that why don’t I make them full spectrum?”

She started with 12 colors. Today, her company has many times that in four different palettes: Nature’s Palette, Ethereal Mists, Coastal Colors and—for the adventurous—Magical Gems. Kennon also recently added an exterior pallet.

Kennon’s paints have been featured in a forum on the popular Garden Web site and also got press in Southern Accents, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Architectural Digest—twice.

“And then the phones started ringing. We were getting 50 phone calls a day,” Kennon says.

She had to hire a friend to help field the phone calls. That was before costumers could order samples online

(ellenkennon.com).

“Finally I got to a point where I was just miserable,” Kennon says. “It just took over my life. Even though I was pulling in a lot of money it was all going out. I wasn’t seeing any personal income, but I was working 16-18 hours a day.”

Things have calmed down. Kennon hired more staff and moved the whole operation from her home to an empty office in the Shadetree Inn bed and breakfast in St. Francisville. Most of her business these days comes from Garden Web and HGTV message boards, where her products are a hot topic. Now people usually call only when they’re ready to order by the gallon. A gallon of Full Spectrum costs $50, compared to $20 to $40 for standard paints.

California is Kennon’s biggest market, partly because of demand for what she calls “one of the better VOC-free products,” a 100% acrylic, certified “green” product called Lifemaster 2000. VOC stands for volatile organic compounds, which cause smog and which California tightly regulates.

New York is Kennon’s next biggest market. She has never advertised her paints, yet manages to sell about $250,000 worth of them each year—nicely augmenting the money she makes from her design business, Ellen Kennon Design.

Dr. Candice Sullivan, a St. Francisville dentist who runs Sullivan Dental Center with her husband, Dr. Frank Sullivan, was one of Kennon’s first customers. Kennon did the clinic’s interior in a full spectrum soft green that nails the upscale, spa-like ambience they were looking for.

“It’s the most healing, peaceful color you’ve ever seen,” Sullivan says.

That’s nothing compared to Kennon’s job on the Sullivans’ house—a seven-year-old red brick the couple planned to flip as soon as they could get a new one built. Then Kennon went to work—inside and out. The Sullivans liked the result so much they forgot about the new house and opted to stay put.

The Moss Green exterior harmonizes with the surrounding flora, and the interior colors—Adobe, Chestnut, Edgewood Green and Olive—“bring the outside in,” which is Kennon’s modus operandi. She took a clunky, awkward house and made it warm, cozy—maybe even romantic, Sullivan says. It made the carpet, furniture and floors, which hadn’t been on speaking terms, all come together.

“How it looks at 12 o’clock is not how it looks at 9 o’clock,” Sullivan says. “It’s amazing the way it goes from a green to a brown.”

Maybe not everybody “gets” the allure of full spectrum, as Kennon herself admits, though Sullivan is clearly a believer in the product as well as Kennon’s daring sense of design.

“People think you’re crazy, but it really is true,” Sullivan says. “She’s a wild woman and she gets out there because she’s an artist, but she knows her stuff and she knows her colors.”