Read this article if you are looking for style tips to colour match your home.

Colour can be used throughout your home to create a sense of flow and add your own personality to a space. Whether you want to go with natural rustic shades and textures or colour block with bright bolds and geometric prints. The idea is not to decorate rooms as separate spaces per se, but to let them interconnect in some way. And this can be done through colour. Let’s look at a few ways to best colour match your home, starting from the design mood board.

Create a mood board and begin colour matching

Collect your favourite fabric and wallpaper samples. Take colour inspiration from a work of art. Put red next to pink. Let all the great ideas flow into one another and use your imagination.

What colours are you drawn to? Warm colours are generally yellows, reds, oranges, while blues and greens and purples fall into the cool colour category. If you prefer neutral, minimal or monochromatic schemes, a hint of colour can be introduced through ceramics, coffee table books and accessories.

With an initial colour scheme in place on the drawing board, it’s easy to work with different options of shades and tones that compliment the chosen core colours.

The Red Thread

The red thread is a concept in interior design which aesthetically ‘sews’ together various colour themes across various rooms with rugs, throws and textiles. A burgundy-coloured rug in one room might accent blush pink walls in another room. The red thread could be yellow or green, it’s the continuity within your home of a design, colour scheme or texture, that brings it all together. It’s a great way to colour match the interior scheme as a whole within your home.

The world of colour blocking: Bye-bye white walls

Colour blocking is a great contemporary decoration idea for bedrooms. It can solve architectural dilemmas by creating definitions in awkward spaces. On a limited budget, you could colour block the walls and the floors for a modern look.

Created by Dutch artist Mondrian in the early 1900s, colour blocking is essentially the placement of two blocks of colour side by side. The exploration of pairing together colours that are mostly opposites on the colour wheel, to make interesting and complementary colour combinations. It is everywhere from art to fashion, as experiments with geometric forms, usually squares and grids of black lines.

Experiment with complementary colours, as well as bold clashing colours, which can work well together too. Colour blocking is great because it works with different looks and themes. Have fun with it, there are lots of cool looks you can achieve. Paint your furniture, or even just a frame, the same colour as the walls.

Accent colours

It’s about layering colour and adding various pops of colour to your interior styling. Put clashing fabrics together if they work well colour wise. Be creative with coloured grouts and tiles when colour blocking your bathroom or kitchen breakfast area. And pick out textiles, bedding, cushions and complimentary tablewear to complete the equation in the living room, dining room and bedroom.

Wallpaper

When colour matching your home, wallpaper samples and fabric swatches are the best way to live with a colour or design for a while and see if it looks right in the interior space you had in mind.

Look also at the colour combinations on wallpapers, they will have been designed by expert brands and colourists.Accent colours in wallpaper are a good starting point to select paint colours for matching walls and woodwork, going up or down a few shades, within the same colour spectrum.

Colour, colour, on the wall

Everything depends on the light, and whether you are working with north or south facing rooms.

In the UK, we are fortunate to have fantastic paint brands. Order a tester bottle in your chosen colour to see how it looks in the light, as sometimes the colour you have in mind is darker or lighter than what you imagined it would be. And repeat, until you get the desired effect and dream colour.

You can also take inspiration from the global design trends set by the design industry itself, eg the Dulux Colour of the Year, the shade for 2022 is Bright Skies. Or the always exciting Pantone Colour of the Year 2022, which is17-3938 Very Peri, a dynamic periwinkle blue. They describe it as a colour “whose courageous presence encourages personal inventiveness and creativity.”

Colour inspiration

Mix and match different colour combinations and move things around, as there are so many different ways to play around with colours and patterns in your home.