Inspiration
Are you struggling to find that perfect shade for your home?
Creating a cohesive paint color scheme in a house is like selecting your wardrobe—you may love more than one color, but you wouldn’t wear everything at once. The same applies to choosing a unifying palette. When deciding on the hues for your home, it helps to go back to the basics. The paint colors you surround yourself with are more than just a backdrop for your decor and art. They can affect your mood, energy level, and mindfulness, making them a key element of your home aesthetic and lifestyle.
Start with where your home is located. “When beginning a project, look to the home’s surrounding environment for color clues,” suggests Gary McBournie, a designer in Boston. “A good designer can make most color choices work. However, some choices may be more appropriate for a specific home than others.” For example, the discord between a moody interior paint and the atmosphere of a seaside residence might be tough to pull off.
Look inside your front door. If you have a piece of furniture, artwork, or another feature that everyone sees, and that you intend to keep there long-term, then think about matching one of its colors to create a flow between exterior and interior.
Here are a few things that you need to consider before painting:
Mood - Lighting - Cohesiveness
When you’re choosing a paint color for a room, it is important to consider the type of mood you want the room to have. Are you looking to make the space cozy? Warm shades, such as greiges, tans, or taupes will make a space feel warm and inviting. Do you want to create a space that feels soothing? Blue and blue-green paint colors are great for inducing feelings of comfort and relaxation. Do you want the space to feel dramatic and moody? Dark, saturated paint colors can do this. There are many things we can do to make a room feel cozy, but it all starts with the paint color. The paint color in the room really sets the tone for the whole atmosphere for the space.
Warm Palette
Relaxing Cozy Palette
Tranquil Palette
Moody Palette
Cool Palette
Monochromatic colour palette
Ivory & warm neutrals colour palette
Deciding on a cool-tone or warm-tone palette is often influenced by the home’s environment and existing elements and furnishings. Once you determine which color family works best, stick to it, Alexander says. “I like my rooms to talk to one another, and a neutral can be the conversation facilitator".
For example, a neutral color on the trim and doors throughout the home can help connect the spaces. Also using a neutral as a “palette cleanser” on the walls of a room that may be between other rooms with stronger colors.
You don’t have to commit to one color throughout, even in a common area. “When you have rooms that connect, and you want to create a nice flow, choose a color that is a few shades lighter or darker within the same color family and tones,” Banbury says. “It is easier on the eyes when you transition from room to room.”
Inviting a new color can give your house much needed dimension. “Part of the fun in design is not limiting yourself to a confined box,” says Margaret Naeve Parker, founder of M.Naeve in Houston. “I love a house that has a room, or two, with a nice bold color that differs from the rest of the home.” When the wall paint transitions well, that peekaboo moment sparks a pleasant surprise. Parker recommends limiting this effect to a dining room or a study in order to avoid a color clash that comes off as too busy.
Open floorplans may have inspired many homeowners to use a single color throughout their entire space, but incorporating different tones into each area—or adding unexpected accents—allows you to create visual zones for different parts of your layout. "Since the pandemic, our houses have to work so much harder for us, as we need to zone areas to cook, work and play in, so we are introducing more color and using it in different ways," says Studholme.
At Clare, Gibbons and her team see "punchy, vibrant" colors drawing the most interest via social media and page views. "For the average person, there's something really aspirational about going outside of that beige or white box," she says. "People default to what's easy, so we're working on ways to inspire people more to step outside of that color comfort zone and try things that they otherwise wouldn't have considered. I think that's where the real magic happens."
One thing that people can forget when choosing a paint color is to consider how much light is in a room. A room with limited light will make a medium or dark paint color look less vibrant. In contrast, a really bright room can make a light paint color look washed out. If a room has adequate lighting though, a good rule of thumb is to choose a paint color with an LRV (Light Reflectance Value) in the 70s. Paint colors in this range tend to have just the right amount of weight on walls without being too imposing.
As a reminder, LRV tells us how much light a color absorbs on a scale from 0 to 100 with 0 being pure black and 100 being pure white. The lower the number, the less light the color will reflect and will therefore feel darker. The higher the LRV number, the more reflective the color, making a space feel lighter and brighter.
Check out how the lighting changes the colors in these photos
