Painting the town red, tangerine, cobalt

AT 76, Ann McGuirk seems an unlikely candidate to make waves, but the great-grandmother is taking a step as radical as it gets in suburbia. She's having the outside of her Santa Monica home painted a color bolder than beige. A lot bolder. A crew of painters is putting the finishing touches on a cobalt blue deep enough to dive into.

"It's very blue," says a jogger, shuffling by on the tree-lined street of rehabbed Craftsmans and Tudors.

July is peak home-painting season, and you can drive through neighborhoods from Malibu to Palm Springs and find the few, the brave, the festive -- people such as the McGuirks who are unafraid to let the block know that life is better in living color. There's the day-glo orange home lighting up a corner of Venice, the sapphire-soaked adobe with a luminous tangerine wall in Mar Vista, the home in Santa Monica that's lime green with blue trim.

Mark Shaw calls these beacons of vivaciousness "Easter eggs," and he's never too excited to see one. When he spots an egg house shining on brightly, "it's like, there goes the neighborhood," says Shaw, a real estate agent for ReMax who used to live near a home painted pink and purple. "It's equivalent to a house that's been run down. If it's in an urban area, it's a little better, but if it's in a suburb, it really sticks out."

In the organism that is a neighborhood, expressing your creative freedom through house paint can stir up unrest -- clashing aesthetics, worries about property values and lawsuits from homeowners' associations. Novelist Sandra Cisneros wound up in a high-profile dispute with her neighborhood association and the city of San Antonio when the shade she picked for her house was deemed too purple.

Safe paint colors may be easier, but they have led to a monotonous residential landscape and turned the city of real light, sunny Los Angeles, into a pale version of what it could be, say some design experts. "The light in Southern California works great for color," says Frank Mahnke, an environmental designer with offices in San Diego and Geneva, and author of "Color, Environment & Human Response." He says homeowners as well as builders just don't take advantage of their options.

Not McGuirk. Living between two white houses, with more white and beige across the street, she doesn't mind being an island of blue in her home of 37 years. "We're very big fans of Catalina," she says. "That's the color of houses on Catalina and the ocean."