The one thing that most people find really difficult about doing up their interiors is choosing colours. It all starts, for most people, with the wall paint. Paint companies confuse you by telling you that they have millions of shades, and then expect you to choose. It’s difficult enough choosing what to order from a menu at a restaurant, let alone choose a few colours out of millions that you’ll have to live with for a few years.
I have a solution for you. Let your favourite painter – Monet, Van Gogh, Hussain, and the like – choose for you. The key to getting the right mix of colours is to balance them out. This Tripvillas property has the living room in the colour teal.
If we were to do a room in teal, my painting of choice (yours may vary, of course, and that’s fine) is Claude Monet’s Cliff Walk.
Look at the colours Monet used to balance the teal in this picture – yellow ochre, and its tints and tones. Teal is a beautiful colour for interiors, as it goes very well with yellow based wood colours such as teak. If you need more shades, add tints and tones of teal grey and yellow grey. A sample colour palette could be this:
Using this palette, an interior could look like this:
Now, isn’t that an improvement? And you can claim that Monet did your interiors.
Once you do something like this, you can even accessorise the art in complementary shades.
Of course, just because you want to use teal, it doesn’t mean that your interior has to look just like the images above. We’ll look at inspiration now from another Monet painting, San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.
This gives us a complex, bright colour palette of hues of teal and ochre, containing yellows, orange, pure teal and plum.
This colour scheme can give us dramatic and rich interiors, as in this lobby:
Another example, this one with a single accent colour – plum – and different shades of teal and greys.
And finally, an example with two accent colours – orange and green – with different shades of teal and greys.
The other rooms in this property use beige and brown. This combination seems the easiest, but it is the most difficult colour scheme to get right. It usually ends up dull and spotted with dark wood patches with an overpowering off-white backdrop.
With heavy wooden furniture and door and framed interiors, leave the rest alone. Use tints and tones of colours with a yellow base, and use an accent colour of greyish blue.
Use a large white area to highlight the cream and off-white. This can be the bedlinen in this case. Avoid patterned bedlinen. As the wood is the dominant colour, the rest of the room has to be in colours that soften the brown.
If you follow these colour guidelines, the bedrooms should look like this:
So, to recap, if in doubt about choosing a colour palette, use a favourite painting as inspiration and guide. Avoid large dark expanses of one dominant colour, and dilute the impact of dark furniture by complementary light expanses.
Looking for home decor tips and ideas? Browse from our articles below and you are sure to find something that will help you in creating magic when you redo your house next time:
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