Free to be colorful

This time of year — with the tulips and daffodils, purple clover and apple blossoms — certainly speaks the language of color. All around us, flower beds and parks are dressing up in their green and yellow and blue finery. The cherry blossoms have bloomed in DC, carpeting the paths in that sweet soft pink. Color populates the world in profusion, and I often find myself inspired to catch a little of it to keep indoors, whether with a new art find at a local shop or just with a vase of fresh-cut orange chrysanthemums.

Color has long been understood to affect not only the visual aesthetics of our surroundings, but the way we feel in and move through them. Shades of blue tend to be soothing and centering; greens can be invigorating, refreshing; softer, lighter neutrals can make spaces feel more open, more peaceful. The way your space is colored has a real effect on your mood, so when you think about colors for your home, what you’re really thinking about is how you want each room to feel. It can be a lot to consider!

When you’re considering home design, you want to aim for a nice sense of aesthetic cohesion, and operating from a unified color palette can go a long way towards achieving that put-together sense while still suiting your specific tastes. A foundational color palette gives you a baseline — a standard against which you can measure your color choices for things like lighting, fabrics, and hardware. This way, you end up with a lovely sense of harmony, where the various tones and shades of your tables and art are concordant with your walls, ceiling, and molding.

Now, it’s not about total homogeneity — a whole-house paint plan doesn’t entail painting every wall in every room the same color. Each room in your home has different functional needs, and a different goal atmosphere. That energizing sage green you put on an accent wall in your kitchen — a place of activity, where you often find yourself in motion — might not quite suit a bedroom, where you’d like to cultivate a more placid, restful atmosphere. And besides, all one color? Where’s the fun in that?

When you plan your home’s color scheme, you do want to repeat some color elements throughout, to help build that sense of unity. You can diversify your palette by considering the aesthetic and functional goals of each room (as in the kitchen/bedroom example), which will allow you to branch out a little without losing cohesion. Accent walls are great ways to add pops of different, more striking color — or wallpapers, too — without sacrificing harmony in your home. 

First, you’ll want to select the color or colors for your common areas — your living room, your kitchen, and sometimes your dining room. If you’re working with a smaller footprint or an open floor plan in which these rooms are all connected, you might want to opt for one color for all of them. If you’ve got more subdivision and more wall space to play with, you can broaden the palette. Since these rooms get the most traffic, they make a great anchor around which to build the rest of your paint plan.

After you set the starting point, you can move on to considering colors for adjoining secondary spaces — offices, bathrooms, and bedrooms (and your dining room, if it wasn’t part of your common area color plan). This is where you can start adding more to your palette, and specializing your color selections to fit the sensibility of each space. Bedrooms are a great place to experiment with color, since those rooms are so personal to the user. 

And then — accent colors! Accent colors can go on specific walls, or define specific rooms (which then function as accents themselves — think a fun pop of color in a guest bathroom or a home office). You can even consider an accent color on your front door! It can help to pull accent colors from the specific decor of the room. For instance, if you have a lot of blue tones in your furniture in a room with neutral walls, a complementary accent wall could really make those blue pieces pop.

Designing a home paint plan can be a lot to consider — which is why designers like me are here to help! Looking to get a paint plan for your whole home? Drop me a line and let’s chat! I’d love to help you put your palette together.

In the meantime, I hope your spring is beginning to bloom. Take some time to relish in the brilliance of the season!