Big or small, summer house or downtown apartment, every project of interior design in Fort Lauderdale starts with finding the right color palette. A harmonious color scheme brings balance to a home, and helps their owners fill their living space with personality.
For fans of neutral tones, it’s relatively easy. But for those who love color, being able to have various matching tonalities is a challenge. Here is how you to create a cohesive color scheme, so you can add crazy colors to your residential design in a tasteful way.
What’s a Color Scheme?
A color scheme is a combination of colors, be it for decoration, clothing, branding or other design purposes. It aims to understand the relationships between colors and how they work together using the color wheel.
Colors that complement one another are harmonious, which allows them to effectively communicate a message, create visual interest, and establish hierarchies among objects. However, without a well-thought direction for your palette, achieving all of that can be hard.
The consequences of not following a color scheme are aiming to add too many colors to your house’s design, mixing different moods on each room or lacking balance. On the other hand, maintaining a tonal constancy builds continuity from one room to another, while giving a distinct attitude to your home.
Why Do You Need a Whole House Color Palette?
Besides ensuring that your house’s design is visually appealing, having a whole house color scheme offers other benefits, like:
- Establishes a consistent framework to explore or add details in colors, while still keeping a harmonious appearance.
- Reduces the number of color choices you have when redecorating a room.
- Gives you flexibility to explore and move your furniture around. You can exchange pieces around rooms without worrying that they won’t match.
- Adjusted to a house’s lighting, enhancing or abating the natural light.
- Set the mood by taking advantage of color psychology. Neutral palettes of grey, beige and bone white can fill yourself with calm, ideal for a vacation house. On the other hand, blue is associated with calmness, but also with knowledge, wisdom, and power. Because of this, it’s ideal for office spaces and commercial interiors, where you want to feel relaxed but also motivated.
As you can see, each color’s meaning is unique, and the differences between them are very subtle. Color schemes take all of that into consideration, to create a balanced space.
How to Create a Color Scheme
Interior design professionals use color to achieve the mood their clients are looking for, while maintaining a certain design style.
Here’s how we do it:
1. Pick the Bases
Start by choosing from two to four basic colors from the color wheel. These aren’t the actual colors you’ll be using, but the color families we’ll start with. At this beginning stage, the goal is to figure out what kind of place you want your home to be.
Warm colors such as yellow, orange, and red are stimulating and can make a room feel warmer. They are ideal for feeling re-energized when you return home. Cool colors, such as blue, green, and purple, are more calming and relaxing, aiding in stress reduction.
You can also start with an heirloom, rug or piece of art. Remodeling a house implies starting from zero, but there’s always some things you’ll want to pick. And you make a minimalist winter home, it’ll be hard to make your grandmother’s pink rug fit in the living room.
2. Pick Your Neutrals
To mix a variety of colors within one space, keeping a neutral color as a base is crucial. Neutral colors help make the space feel a bit more grounded and sophisticated. Because of that, selecting neutral colors shouldn’t be underestimated easily.
- Whites come in a wide variety and can be the defining point in a palette’s cohesiveness. Adding bone white to a minimalist palette brings a traditional air, while sharper, brighter whites can make the room feel electric.
- A rich classic black adds dimension to your home and can help you update your space to a whole new level.
- Accent colors can fill a palette with character, while not feeling too overpowering.
3. Include Accents
Accent colors allow you to include subtle tones of certain pigments with style. You can have a neutral or monochromatic room and add a few accented elements to make your space pop.
For example, get brightly colored pillows and picture frames. In the kitchen, replacing the cabinetry with trendy colors can be a fun way to explore. An accent wall can bring in more color for your rooms and let the owner fill their space with personality.
Accents can be a little bit bolder, metalized colors like gold, silver and copper, or add textured accents. This means that every time you decide to add that color, it’ll be with a texture.
4. Make It All Come Together
The last step to make all of this come together in one color palette that will serve as guide during your entire interior design process. To do so, start searching for tonalities among the first colors you picked.
This is the hardest part, as you need to ensure your basic colors, neutrals and accents match. Play around with intensity, saturation and tonality, or add some secondary colors to make the entire palette match. As long as the end result isn’t more than 4 or 5 colors, you can play around.
Change Your Interior Design in Fort Lauderdale
Laying out a color scheme is the best way to stylishly mix and match colors in any style of home that showcases your personality. When it comes to interior design, having fun and enjoying the process is as important as the end result. So don’t let any doubts keep you from playing with colors.
If you’re ready to experiment with us, give us a call!