Palette Pleaser
Using color effectively is all about proportions.
Photo by Aspen Architectural Photography
Nothing impacts a home’s interior design as powerfully as color. Choose well, and color will add warmth, character, and vitality to the indoor environment. Misfire on your palette choice, however, and color can become overwhelming, discordant, even irritating.
So how to select colors in a way that works? Your first big choice is between a warm or cool palette. Cool colors, such as blues and off-whites, tend to separate and create more contrast in a room. Reds, yellows, and other warm colors blend angles and surfaces together. Grays and greens can be warm or cool depending upon their particular hue.
Of course, the existing colors in your home help make the palette decision, too. Happy with your upholstery? Then focus your color choices on paint, art, and accessories that accentuate those fabrics. Love your art collection? Let your paintings guide your color choices of upholstery, rugs, and walls.
Just be sure to take into account any dominant architectural features in your home, such as built-in cabinetry, doors, wood ceilings, or stone fireplaces. They create large color blocks, and you have no choice but to adapt your design to them.
Room size is also an important consideration. A very large room benefits from being broken up by contrasting colors on walls and ceilings. Conversely, smaller spaces will feel larger if you keep the walls and ceilings all the same color.
Next comes tone. Tone is the lightness or darkness of a color as opposed to the actual color or hue. It’s important to realize that tones are relative. A tone that’s light in one context may seem darker in another if it’s surrounded by even lighter tones.
A useful rule-of-thumb ratio for tone is 60/30/10. For example, if light tan walls and ceilings make up 60 percent of your room’s color, then opt for 30 percent in darker reds and browns and 10 percent in bright orange or black accessories as framing, art, or throw pillows. Or you can reverse those percentages.
In the room above, the floors, walls, and bedding are all a light neutral color that works well with the stone fireplace. This is the 60 percent light tone. The warm wood tones make up another 30 percent of the overall palette, and the tomato reds and the dark woods add the 10 percent of strong accents. Note how the various colors are balanced around the room. It helps that the reds sit against the lighter neutral—they stand out more. Because this is a large room with high ceilings, the contrast of the trim against the lighter walls works well. In a smaller room, it would work better if the trim and walls were closer in tone.
In the room at right, the walls and floor create a neutral overall tone in a medium hue. The brown bedding and furniture are about 30 percent of the palette, with the green and chocolate as the accent colors. Notice how the warm color of the walls blend the adjacent colors, which does well for this small bedroom.
Since a color overhaul is a considerable commitment, test your proposed colors (including your existing ones) by creating a collage using the 60/30/10 rule. Paint a piece of cardstock with a “sample pot” of your proposed wall color (or use a large color sample), then lay out fabric, paint chips, photos, or magazine photos in the relative amounts you will see. You’ll get an immediate idea if your palette works.
