How to Color Coordinate Your Interior Design

How to Color Coordinate Your Interior Design

October 9, 2019 0 By admin

Designing a whole room — not to mention a whole house! — can be overwhelming. With so many choices to make, from wall paint to furniture to flooring, it’s hard to know where to begin. One way to streamline the process is by choosing a color scheme. Color can give you a starting point for the rest of your interior decorating plans. Here are some no-fail ways to go about color coordinating your interior design.

Go Monochromatic

For a straightforward way to color coordinate a room, try choosing just one color and varying it by shade. For example, you can choose to decorate all or most of the room in shades of grey. You might start with light grey walls and medium grey curtains. Then, you could add gunmetal grey furniture and accent the room with silver or metallic grey throw pillows. A room like this is easy to decorate, yet the different shades provide plenty of variety.

Monochromatic color schemes are a good choice when decorating small living spaces. The continuation of a single color can make the room appear larger than it is. To give a room a greater sense of depth, consider matching your drapes or curtains to the color of the surrounding wall. Not only does it make the whole wall look wider, it creates a clean and coherent backdrop to frame the rest of your interior decor.

Try the 60-30-10 Rule

Another popular color strategy used in interior design is the 60-30-10 rule. This rule suggests designing 60% of the room according to a base color, 30% to a secondary color, and 10% to an accent color. For example, you could choose beige walls and floors as your base. Then you could find a sea green couch and curtains to fill in your secondary color. Finally, you can add an accent of canary yellow or teal blue in the form of throw pillows or piece of art.

The 60-30-10 rule is effective for someone who doesn’t want a monochromatic look but still wants a room to feel balanced and put together. It provides an easy-to-follow guide for decorating while still leaving plenty of room to experiment with allocating your three colors.

Add Two Accent Colors

Can’t choose just one accent color for your last 10%? Choose more than one! Interior designers call this the 110% rule. It’s similar to the 60-30-10 rule except you choose two accent colors. You might, for instance, choose a cream colored base, rose furniture, and then both gold and silver pieces to accent the room.

For some rooms, the 110% rule is easier to follow and makes more visual sense than a normal 60-30-10 rule. Especially if your base and secondary colors are relatively subtle, sometimes two accent colors look better than one. The extra color also adds vibrancy if you’re going for a more lively interior design.

The Rule of Three

If you like the idea of a three color palette but don’t want to worry about the exact proportions, just follow the rule of three. Pick three colors that work well together, and choose furniture, paint, and window decor according to those. For example, decorate everything in dark brown, sea green, and dark blue, or maybe dark orange, teal, and white. No need to worry about dividing them up into exact proportions, just pick what you think looks right. This three color palette will look harmonious and organized without feeling forced.

Design Around One Piece

If you’re having trouble deciding on a color scheme for a whole room, you can also start with just one piece. Find a patterned rug a set of decorative curtains that you really like, and then coordinate your colors around that. You can match throw pillows to one color in the pattern and a coffee table to another to create a coherent design with minimal effort.

Say, for instance, you have love a rug with a green and orange geometric design. You can paint an accent wall dark green, find a matching orange throw blanket, and then keep the rest of the room simple in color.

Coordinating around one statement piece works especially well if you’re redecorating a room rather than designing it for the first time. It’s a strategic way to update a space without starting from scratch.

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Choosing a color scheme is an easy starting point for interior decorating. It can make choosing furniture, window treatments, wall paint, and the rest of your decor infinitely easier. In addition, color coordinating makes a room’s interior look harmonious and aesthetically pleasing. Hopefully these tips can give you decorating ideas if you’re stuck. However, at the end of the day, there are no hard and fast rules for the perfect palette. Use your own judgement for what you think looks good. After all, it’s your home!