Ways To Bring Color Into Your Home’s Interior

When it comes to home décor, utilizing a lot of color can be intimidating because a few poor decisions can make an entire room look disjointed. Many home furnishings and embellishments require a considerable investment of time and money. You should try minimizing mistakes with them. A notable majority of people almost exclusively work with beiges and browns, grayscale tones, and widespread, inoffensive colors such as navy or light blue. Move beyond these limitations and express yourself to a greater degree with the following ways to bring color into your home’s interior.

Follow the 60-30-10 Rule

The 60-30-10 rule describes a guiding ratio that you can depend on when crafting a pleasant color scheme with the right amounts of modesty and zest. The numbers represent the percentages of a particular room that you fill with your chosen colors. 60 percent of the space should feature a dominant color, 30 percent should have a secondary and more interesting color, and 10 percent should include an accent.

The dominant color may be a neutral hue, like white, black, and brown, or a desaturated hue that will not overpower everything around it. The secondary color can lean either closer to neutrals or closer to lively colors, depending on your tastes. It is the link between the dominant color and the accent. As for the accent, feel free to go with a striking choice that immediately captures people’s attention. Of course, the specific set of colors is left in your hands. Switching the amount of a color or swapping one color for another can have a dramatic effect on a room. Consider a room in which you use light gray as the 60 percent hue. You could accompany this with 30 percent brown and 10 percent muted blue for a soft aura. Switch that blue to 30 percent and make bright yellow your 10 percent color, and you will find that your room feels more animated.

Use Nature as Inspiration

Nature is a great source of inspiration when trying to find effective ways to bring color into your home’s interior. If you stop to think about it, you will find that a room’s inorganic components complement the vegetation and animals within nature. Look at various natural settings and note the variety of colors. From there, you can select hues that best reflect your personality or the region in which you live.

In a forested area, you will see light and deep greens, browns, grays, and perhaps hints of orange of other vibrant hues from flowers and small organisms. On the other hand, a desert would feature beige, taupe, and yellow from the sand, as well as lighter grays, browns, reddish tints, and violet in the distant horizon. If you gaze at a cold landscape, you will see white because of the snow, various gradations of blue from the sky and ice, and small bits of green and brown from plants. On your own, you might not pair these colors together, but nature will direct you toward a solid balance that looks fitting because of its innate familiarity.

Think of Color Temperature

Color temperature refers to the warmth or coolness of a visual arrangement. At its most basic level, it divides colors into those two camps, with reds, oranges, and yellows representing warmth, and greens, blues, and violets representing coolness. These hues are adjacent on the color wheel and feel natural when placed side to side. To illustrate, you might want to ensure a wall and nearby chair fit together. You could paint the wall blue while upholstering the chair with green fabric. These colors belong to the cool family, and as a result, and will not clash.

Temperature can extend beyond this to bring together even more aspects of a room. You could use orange or blue as an underlying tone behind the various pieces. For example, you could use a wallpaper that is technically beige, but has a light orange or yellowish undertone to make it appear warm. It can still act as a neutral, but it will have a clear leaning toward the warm end of the color temperature scale, and your other color choices should reflect this. To acquire a better understanding of this concept, you could go into your smartphone’s photo editing screen. Most likely, there is an option to adjust the color temperature of images. You can see what warm and cool temperatures look like in the same picture.

Reference Color Schemes

If you feel that selecting colors yourself is too complex and you want to follow a reference, you can check out different patterns and color schemes. If you find any appealing, identify the colors that professional designers used and model your room’s color palette around your findings. Rugs, wallpaper, upholstery, and drapes all make for good references because they can have patterns that include three or more colors. With references, you can figure out what hues work together, and how much to display in your room.

For instance, you could turn your attention to a hypothetical floral wallpaper design. The flowers may be pink and off-white, while their stems and leaves are outlined in black, blue-green, and yellow-green. In the empty space behind these images, the wallpaper may feature that same off-white that appears in the flowers, along with small hints of mustard yellow in a few stray leaves. From this, you can assume that your dominant, baseline color is off-white. Paint architectural fixtures in this hue and find a nice off-white sofa to go with them. With single-person chairs, tables, throw pillows, and rugs, you could use pink, black, and those variations of green. For the small ornaments, such as vases or tabletop sculptures, add a dash of mustard to accent the room. This is a highly utilitarian approach that still carries you to your end goal of establishing a classy interior space. It can also help you become savvier with decorating, since it will naturally train your eye to understand what colors complement each other.

Use your newfound knowledge on color coordination to select the best fabrics and wallpaper for your home. Contact Decorator’s Best to explore our designer offerings, which include Schumacher fabric and York wallpaper, among many others.