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How to decorate your home with colour

"...one of the simplest, most inexpensive and effective ways of improving your home"

Everyone thinks of colour when they think of interior design. 

It is a dominant element, when it comes to putting a room scheme together, because it evokes emotion and strong opinion. However, sometimes people tend to forget about textures, patterns, the proportions of the room, and light, all of which have an important role to play when to comes to whether a colour scheme will work or not. How to decorate your home isn’t as simple as slapping some paint on the walls.

That’s not to play down the importance of colour itself – it’s one of the simplest, most inexpensive and effective ways of improving your home.

But it can be one of the most complex elements to understand and use correctly, having both an aesthetic and functional purpose.

It’s understandable that developing a creative scheme for your home can be overwhelming, especially if you thought it was just about choosing colours you like! 

Our understanding of how colour works has come far in the 400 years since Isaac Newton first shone a light beam through a prism and discovered a rainbow. 

How we see colour is manipulated by our eyes and brain, which makes describing colour really tricky. This means a range of terms have developed to help us articulate what we see and like, but navigating tones, tints, shades, values, intensities and hues doesn’t necessarily make it easier when we just want to have a nice home.


And then there’s the tricks on the eye. Why is it that the bright blue velvet sofa you bought looks more like navy against that light wall? Why does the room feel smaller when you painted it in library red? Why does this fabric in green look yellow when you’re pretty sure it was a cool colour when you saw it in the shop?


And there are whole books written about colour psychology and colour association. Why do you eat more in a fast-food restaurant with red décor? Why can’t you sleep in your brightly coloured bedroom? Why do colours stir up certain memories?


Colour is a multi-sensory experience. Different colours make us think and feel differently. Colours can manipulate our spaces, and our minds. So where do you start?! After all, we all need colourful interiors that bring us joy at the moment.


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If you’d like to know more about how to put a colour scheme together, you may be interested in a short colour course designed to help DIYers. It not only offers explanations to all the questions above, but also gives insight into different types of colour schemes.

 

It’s full of top tips and inspiration to guide you through how to use colour in your home and your next perfect colour palette.


Find out more