Donald Kaufman

In 1976, my wife and partner, artist Taffy Dahl, and I began to collaborate with the best and best-known talents in architecture and design. We’ve traveled widely to design palettes for unique locations and geographies, and have created colors for a broad range of structures: from contemporary city apartments to great country houses, as well as hotels, restaurants, stores, libraries, and art museums.

Together we have designed more than 30,000 custom colors. We came to this profession as working artists, recognizing the unexplored color potential of standard paint. We formulate our colors one at a time, to capture each hue’s individual character.
These collaborations have informed our design philosophy and practices in creating the Donald Kaufman Color Collection.

Our methods allow miniscule particles of pigment suspended in skeins of paint to exhibit a spectral subtlety – blues and purples peeking out of reds and yellows. The effect is one of color luminosity – of light coming from within. We are devoted to providing a better quality of color, in paint, and we hope you will experience the atmospheric effects our colors can bring to your living spaces.


“After you’ve seen his work, other paint looks dead.” — Max Protech.
Art dealer Max Protetch hired Kaufman to paint his gallery, then gave him an opening, featuring the bare walls.

“Donald’s colors are extraordinary, they have more depth, magnitude and subtlety than regular paints. What a luxury!”
— Mariette Himes Gomez, Interior Designer / excerpt: House & Garden