Home Decor 101: How To Decorate With Colors
Decorating with colors may seem intimidating at first, but it doesn’t have to be as big of a challenge as you think. You can easily create a seamless color scheme throughout your space that can make your home feel inviting and personal to you. Home decor color choice is a great way to express your own style or to take a risk and have fun with your living space. Whether you’re redecorating or starting from scratch, here are some tips on how to decorate with colors.
Tip #1: Choose Your Home Decor Colors Wisely
Colors can set the tone and mood of your home, so you’ll want to choose your color schemes wisely in order to enjoy the space you’re living in. You need to consider the many different aspects of your color choices before you dive in and begin decorating. While you can be more spontaneous and have fun with some colors in your home, it’s best to think things through before committing.
How To Choose A Color Scheme For Your Home
The first step in choosing a color scheme is to decide on a warm or cold color palette. Warm versus cold plays a big part in setting the entire mood and feeling of your home. If you want a more relaxing and calm space, you’d probably be more interested in decorating with cold colors. However, if you want a warm and vibrant environment, warm colors would be the best choice for you.
While a huge part of this color selection is based on personal choice and style, you also need to consider the general layout of your home. For instance, take a look at how much natural light each room gets – some areas of your home may be naturally brighter than others. Typically, rooms that receive less light should have brighter color schemes to open up your space.
It’s best to stick with one general color tone throughout your home. For example if you decide on cold colors, stay with the cold color palette for the entire house. This is the best way to maintain consistency and flow throughout your home. However, there can be some exceptions with using the opposite color palette in some of the rooms in your home if done purposefully.
To tie it all together, think about the overall feeling you want to have when entering your home. If you want your home to be a getaway place to unwind after a long stressful day, cold colors, like shade of blue, are a great choice. If you’d rather your home be an exciting place to energize you after a long day, warm colors such as shades of red are the best match for you.
Tip #2: Stick With A Simple & Small Color Palette
Once you’ve decided on the general colors for your home, you can start painting and decorating accordingly. But another important step to take before decorating is to decide on your color palette for each room. The color palette encompasses the exact shades of colors you want to include in the room.
Generally, you want to keep your color palette limited to just a few colors. If you choose too many, the room can feel cluttered or mismatched. Set a strategic color plan for your palette by using complementary colors, along with a unique accent color that will stand out in the room. Your accent color can either be a different shade of the same main color or it can be a bolder and unexpected color.
How To Decorate With Colors Using The 60-30-10 Rule
The 60-30-10 rule is a design guideline for creating a purposeful color scheme in any room. This rule can help you figure out a plan for each aspect of the room as you put together your vision. This rule doesn’t necessarily have to be followed to a T; however, the general idea of it can make any room look well balanced and nicely designed. Here are the three parts of the rule and what decorative elements are included in each one:
- 60% – Main Color: Walls, large furniture, rugs, and any main pieces in the room
- 30% – Secondary Color: Bedding, window curtains, smaller accent furniture, and sometimes an accent wall
- 10% – Accent Color: Decorative tabletop accents, throw pillows, and wall art
Tip #3: Balance Out Colorful Decor With Neutral Pieces
If you’re looking to experiment with some bold colors in your home, you might end up straying from the typically balanced color palette. While there’s no real repercussion for decorating with a full-fledged assortment of bright colors, there is a general guideline for using bold colors. This guideline can help you keep your home feeling stylish and put together.
In order to decorate with bold colors, it’s important to use a lot of neutral colors in the room. This will allow you to incorporate pops of colors in the room, which gives your space a lot of personality and points of interest. Keep in mind that neutral doesn’t always have to mean beige. Neutral colors can include white, black, gray, brown, and any other color that sets a simple and muted tone.
Use neutrals for all the main elements of your room: the walls, large furniture, and main area rugs. Then, bring in your pops of color through decorative accents such as throw pillows, tabletop decorations, window curtains, and smaller pieces of furniture. You can use just one color as your colorful accent, or you can choose an array of colors for a more fun look. For instance, you can set a bold and stylish look in your living room with a pop of navy blue in your accents. Or you can create a whole tropical scheme with accents in yellow, orange, and teal.
Tip #4: Blend Your Color Scheme Seamlessly Into The Next Room
Another important part of learning how to decorate with colors is also learning how to blend the color scheme of your walls throughout your home in a seamless way that flows naturally. For instance, if your kitchen is next to your family room, you don’t want these rooms to be drastically different because it can be harsh on your eyes and mess with the overall mood of the house.
In order to have consistent color flow in your home with the walls, you first have to think about hallways. These can connect the color scheme from room to room, so it’s best to be strategic. Typically, you’ll want the connecting hallway to be a similar color to the rooms, but it can still be a different shade. Just make sure to only use a slightly different shade so that the change is subtle. Then, in the next room, use another similar color in a separate shade for a mix of flow and uniqueness.
Start with the biggest rooms of your home, along with the main open areas, and work your way from there. The biggest areas should have a shade of color that’s somewhere in the middle of your color scheme. Doing so will make it easier to seamlessly transition from room to room. Keep in mind that most of the flow refers to the wall colors, and that decorations and furniture in each room can vary in color shades.
Tip #5: Incorporate Your Main Color In Other Rooms Through Decorative Accents
As mentioned before, it’s best to stick with a similar color palette throughout your entire house. However, your rooms will most likely vary in colors when compared to the main areas of your home. In order to tie in that main color throughout your home for consistency, you can add it to your rooms in subtle ways.
The best way to do this is through small decorative accents, even just one or two. You can make it even more subtle by including the color within the details of your wall art. An example of this would be if your main color is gray and your master bedroom has a warm orange theme. In this case, you can use gray as your 10% accent color in the bedroom.
This method isn’t always necessary, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind while decorating your home. Sometimes, you’ll find it to be more difficult to include your main color in every room. That being said, when it comes to decorating with colors, follow the main guidelines for a balanced look but mix in your own personal style to get the exact look that you want.
Now that you’ve learned some simple tips on how to decorate with colors, it’s time to get started on decorating the home of your dreams! Shop our selection of Home Decor
