| Decorating
your home should be an enjoyable process that frees your
inner creativity while also expanding your understanding
of style and trends. However many of us get bogged down
in the fraught process of colour selection, especially
when it comes to colour, and end up retreating to predictable
choices on the false assumption that a “safe”
palette will prove both practical and easy to live with.
In fact the exact opposite results when we select colour
merely on a “safe” basis. It is far easier
to live with something you greatly enjoy, rather than
merely tolerating your home environment and trying to
live with it.
The trick of selecting colour begins before you pick up
a colour palette. Before you confront the wall of colour
chips at your local paint store or ever look at a book
of fabric swatches, think in overall terms about who you
are, what you are drawn to, and what kinds of rooms you
most enjoy. What magazines do you always buy? Do you favour
bright, airy modern spaces or rich, dark and cozy rooms?
Are you drawn to traditional rooms or clean lined modern
spaces? What is your favourite time of year? Do you crave
rich colour and complicated patterns or soothing and neutral
natural palettes? Determine what it is that you most love
and are drawn to and take that knowledge with you in the
selection of all your colours.
Build up a scrapbook with the colours, materials, fabrics
and items that will work together to create the effect
that you want in your home. When you see all of your selections
together you begin to understand that a wood floor has
pattern in its grain, texture in its finish and colour;
a granite countertop is cool, hard, smooth and flecked.
In practice, we don’t dissociate these qualities,
they all work together. All of this helps us understand
why we are drawn and respond to specific colours, patterns
and textures and not to others.
In Design, colour is the most subjective area in decoration
and no amount of research will predict how two different
people will respond to the same shade. At the same time,
almost any generalization you can make about a particular
colour can be overturned in practice. However, one truism
holds true for everyone, all of us are instinctively drawn
to specific families of colours which repeatedly pop up
in clothes, treasured pictures or possessions, and of
course on the reverse, there are colours which we will
absolutely abhor.
It takes time to gain a sense of how colour behaves, like
everything else; it’s a question of widening your
visual horizons. Remember to ask yourself how you intend
to use the room, what it looks like in the morning, at
night, which features are worth emphasizing and which
you want to play down, and of course celebrating your
own personal pizzazz.
Top
Back
|
