Style may be innate, but there are room recipes we mere mortals can follow to create a bold statement room that wows. Use this advice to add colour and texture to your home for maximum impact. Great style is the icing on the cake, but we all have the ability to conjure rooms you and your guests will never want to leave. High impact and bold decor can be a daunting prospect, but the rewards can often well and truly make up for the risk taken.
It’s all about combining research with inspiration. Visit art galleries and go through interior design books and magazines to begin mentally filing ideas you’d love to translate into your own rooms. Then collect tear sheets, paint colours and fabric swatches. Aspirational things can often provide the evidence that things that you may not necessarily think work together, in fact, do.
The next step is to listen to what your home is telling you. You need to work out if a room is a summer or a winter room, cool or warm toned, and what the light levels are like. Walls are the background for furniture and decorative elements such as carpets, paintings and window dressings. Consider the style of your furniture, the size of your living room and how much natural light it receives. Its orientation and window positioning also plays a factor.
First you should decide on the overall colour climate of the entire home and then of each room individually. Think about what you’d like to achieve in the room. Do you want this space to feel warm and inviting? Calm and relaxing? Or energising and invigorating?
Warm, cold or neutral
All colours are divided into warm, cold and neutral hues. Warm hues are red, orange stimulating – and all other hues are dominated by them. The cool hues are royal blue, sky-blue, and all spectres of green-blue and blue-violet tones. These tend to be relaxing.
Multi-coloured interiors quickly tire the eye, so it is better not to use more than two-to-three key tones when decorating your interior. Avoid dynamic combinations of supplementary colours –red and green, orange and ultra-marine, yellow and purple – they give the impression of excessive brightness and lead to discomfort.
Light colours and warm hues – golden yellow, pink and cream – reflect more light and create an atmosphere of warm and even sunny rooms. And in rooms filled with sunlight for long hours, the walls should be cool shades of blue, blue-green or grey.
Take into account the purpose of different rooms. Warm tones will be suitable for a bedroom while a nursery or child’s room should be a cleaner, lighter hue. The size of the room also plays a role, as the rule of thumb when designing for a small home is that it’s better to use light and soothing shades, as intense colours tend to shrink rooms visually.
If you’re a little cautious with colour, an excellent way to add a wow factor without diving in head first is with accents. Instead of framing your art with black or white, use vibrant tones like red or aqua. Pick up that shade in other accessories around the room, like throw pillows and lamp bases.
Paper is in!
Wallpaper is now back in vogue thanks to its revamped image. The latest well-designed patterns and full colour spectrum from pastels to punchy shades make it accessible to all homeowners. It's an excellent way to make a bold colour statement on either one feature wall or even all four. Use your wallpaper choice to dictate the direction of the rest of the room, as it tends to be a trendsetting feature in interiors. This doesn’t mean you need to keep your furniture and carpet muted though, feel free to opt for bold but complementary decor.
Take your colour palette from a piece of attention-grabbing artwork you're going to hang in your living room. Assess the colours present in the piece and either match or contrast your walls, floors and furniture. You'll probably be best to keep the furniture and walls solid shades as opposed to patterns, and rugs not too busy-looking.
Be brave, be bold and get colouring for stylish room results!
| House whispering |
| Red | Red elevates mood, but at the same time it is unquiet and turbulent and can annoy the nervous system, it is not recommended for working environments. |
| Orange | Orange makes for good mood and celebratory ambience. |
| Yellow | Yellow is clear, fresh and stimulates eye sight and nervous system. |
| Green | Green is nature-inspired and instills calm and a relaxing mood. It is said to be the most favorable for living in. |
| Blue | Blue with all its hues, gives the impression of open space, depth and cool. It calms the nervous system and improves the working capacity. |
| Violet | Violet promotes melancholic mood and reflection. It was detected that this colour not only relaxes, but it quickly tires people. |
| Combination of several colours in one room brings out more complex feelings, but can create a visual symphony. |
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