I’ll bet you have a strong reaction to color in your home. It either excites you or terrifies you. If it excites you, you have to be careful not to overdo it. If it terrifies you, you have to be careful not to under use it.
What is the right amount of color?
Well, that depends on you, your style and your reaction to color.
One thing is certain though, you should use color intentionally in your home. Don’t let fear rule how little color you use or let overexcitement lead to too much color.
Everyone has a strong emotional connection to color. Different colors make you feel differently, some good, some bad. If you let fear rule your color decisions you will end up with a completely neutral space. You might feel safe in your decisions, but you won’t feel the way you want in your room. Likewise, if you let an insatiable eagerness for colors paint the rainbow in your rooms, you may feel fearless with color, but you won’t feel the way you want in your room.
It doesn’t matter what psychology tells us about how each color makes the average person feel. What matters is how they make you feel and how you want to feel in your home. When used correctly, color enhances the feeling you want in a room. It brings the feeling to life.
Beyond a single room, consistent use of color throughout your home, creates flow. That’s what you want, right? You want a home that flows from room to room. In other words, a cohesive feeling from the front door all the way through the house. You want the rooms in your house to all feel like they go together, like they belong in the same home.
The answer is to use FEWER COLORS. Fewer than what you think you need, anyway. For the over-eager, you don’t need every color in the rainbow to create a colorful home. For the color shy, you don’t need to use a ton of colors to add colorful moments to your home.
What you need is a whole house color palette.
You need to consistently use color to create the feelings you want throughout your home. Color is the great connector in your home. Similar furniture or similar decorating styles from room to room can contribute to a cohesive feeling, but nothing is as powerful as color for connecting spaces and creating flow.
Using a pre-defined color palette is liberating, not limiting. You don’t need a lot of different colors to create a colorful home. You only need the colors that make you feel the way you want.
Once you choose your colors, you can re-use them in different ways throughout your home. The same colors applied in different ways can create different feelings, moods, and personalities for your rooms. Because the color palette is familiar, your home will flow together.
Next week, I am going to show you how the same color palette can be used in different ways from room to room. You’ll also see that repeatedly using similar colors isn’t boring, it’s interesting and it creates a connection between different rooms.
