One of gray's virtues is its ability to make other colors look better. Thomas Eakins coated his canvasses with grays and dotted them with sparks of color. Like the stained glass in Gothic cathedrals, blues, reds, yellows, and oranges pop when surrounded by grayer versions of themselves. Pepe Lopez, who is head of interior design for Alan Wanzenberg Design, had a related epiphany driving up the Taconic Parkway on a fall day. The turning leaves, he said, burst out of the overcast landscape. Like the perfect date at a black-tie benefit, gray makes its companions look more special.

Eakins, Lopez, and my father—Giovanni Pasanella, a retired architect [In 1966, while a member of a group of New York architects called the Greys, he designed a gray house for one Dr. Alan Grey]—all use grayed versions of the highlight colors to tie the scheme into an elegant whole.

A discrete use of gray can ennoble even ordinary white. Framed by light charcoal stripes around the doorways and window openings, the plaster walls of my family's living room in Lucca, Italy, come to the foreground. Surrounded by gray, white goes from default to deliberate. In the hills of Tuscany, or the valleys of Manhattan, one deft move is all it takes to transform humdrum rental white into what fancy catalog companies might call "normandy butter".

Gray can also be used to bring restrained elegance to simple spaces. My father clad a house on Cape Cod with cedar, which weathers to a layered palette of silvers. In Vallecchia, Italy, he outlined the exterior of Villa Belvedere (the home of Lisetta Muller, his longtime companion) in a pale graphite. Boxy, with one baroque swoop over the sundial, the house stands out against the white marble mountains of Carrara, as if one had drawn its outline in the sky.

Dad is hardly the first person to use gray to highlight forms. In the 15th century, Filippo Brunelleschi drew attention to the perfect neo-Platonic geometry of the Church of San Lorenzo, in Florence, with graphite-colored arches.

Gray can also be used to enhance the quality of natural light. Tadao Ando and Louis I. Kahn, two of my favorite modern architects, both coax poetry out of concrete. But perhaps the most dramatic example is Peter Zumthor's 1996 design for the thermal baths at Vals, Switzerland, where walls of stacked quartzite and rising steam take on an almost mystical aura.

Granted, you may not have several tons of Swiss stone lying around, but this use of gray and water to deify light is worth remembering.

In Stockholm, Sweden, the pale wood floors and gray ceilings of the Skogaholm Herrgard, a manor house in a park, make for an elegant dining room, a seigneurial backdrop for a glittery crystal chandelier. Gray linen, like that used at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, also makes an inviting context for art. A white marble sculpture will disappear against white-painted sheetrock, but it gleams against an anthracite panel.

Gray can be as rich as it is understated. In a design by David Mann for a New York loft, gray is the focus rather than the accompaniment. Inspired by the aluminum-clad walls of Andy Warhol's Factory, Mann chose a different gray for each surface. Brick walls are bluish glossy, a sheetrock wall is pearly eggshell, wood ceilings are mauvey flat, floors are blackish lacquer, and radiators are metallic silver.

"I wanted to have a lot happening in this one room without it seeming like too much was happening," he said. In other words, the grays add depth without distraction. (His favorite is Benjamin Moore 2121.10.)

Likewise, in Brian McCarthy's design for David May, a cosmetics executive, the grays are downright voluptuous. Building on the luxuriousness of a parlor floor apartment in a Manhattan town house built by J.P. Morgan, McCarthy used smoky hues to complement the architectural detail.

The richness of gray is also available without the commitment. In a recent loft, I clad a client's kitchen sink and counters in silvery zinc that will weather and richen with use. In the Maritime Hotel, another current project, I used highly-veined Carrara White marble (much less expensive than the blander superwhite version) in the bathrooms to convey a timeless luxury. Even though I am a bit ashamed to use art as wallpaper, it is hard not to be seduced by a wall of black and white photographs.

It is possible to humanize cool grays by lightening them. Think mist, not coal mine.

There are lots of possibilities, which is the point. In recent years, minimal white has given way to an explosion of celadons and cumins and cardamoms, leaving gray all but unnoticed. Why race from one end of the spectrum to the other when the answer could be under your nose?

Gray is timeless. Gray is the old black. So, leave the peaches for Bellinis and take my father's advice. As he told me on a recent birthday, "You'd look better with a little gray."