Interior Design Colors On Purpose

Interior design colors in the home have a great impact. Color affects our feelings and how we view our surroundings and the home is the one place where we can control the use of color and use it to our advantage, improving the quality of our life.

Although colors are often chosen on a feeling or personal preference, you can just as easily choose colors that will support the function of a room.

Besides making your home beautiful, interior design colors can be tools to create and elicit certain moods, add character, or create intimacy to a room, help with concentration, increase the appetite, promote physical healing and just plain makes you look good.

Think about how you want your room to feel when you are in it.

Warm colors in the living room will provide a cozy comfortable feeling to the room and promote conversation.

Warm interior design colors like shades of orange or apricot stimulate the appetite and conversation for use in the dining room or other eating areas like the breakfast room.

An all white bathroom is clean looking and makes a small bath appear larger, and a shade of green is tranquil and healing for a bathroom.

Being exposed too bright yellow for a long period can easily provoke and irritate people. Avoid large quantities of bright yellow in the children's rooms, it can cause siblings who share a room to fight and cause babies to cry more often.

• Cool colors (blues and greens) soothe and relax and warm colors (reds and oranges) are good for play. Bright pink for girls stimulate the imagination but if it is too pale it can cause sleepiness.
• Warm colors, (reds, yellows, and oranges) advance visually, resulting in a cozier atmosphere. So if you have a large space that lacks of intimacy consider using warm colors.

• Darker colors appear to visually advance toward you, so use darker colors to make a larger area more intimate and reduce the sense of space.
• Cool colors (blues, greens and purples) tend to recede visually suggesting a spacious, more open feeling. Use cooler colors to enhance a small space.
• The lighter the color you use on your walls and floor, the larger your room will seem. Also, using the same palette throughout will make a small space seem larger too.

The success of your interior design colors depends not only on the combinations but the texture as well.

If your room has colors that are mostly in the same tonal range then you will want contrasting textures.

A red brick fireplace and a hardwood floor in a cherry finish for example, are in the same tonal range but different textures. Because the textures contrast with each other, (the brick is rough and the floor is smooth) allows the similar tones in the colors to work.

If the colors in the room contrast, the textures need to be more subdued.

The higher the contrast in color the stronger the need will be to keep the textures similar.

The higher the contrast in textures the stronger the need will be to keep the colors similar.

Keep this in mind and your color schemes will be a success.

Color has visual weight. Think of the color weight as the tonal range and what impact it will have in the space.

In a room with the popular color combination of spa blue and chocolate brown the brown will prove to be the dominant color. Replace the chocolate brown with a celery green and the combination takes on an entirely different complexion. It doesn’t have nearly as much impact because both colors have the same color weight.

Lighting plays an important role in the appearance of color in a room. A cool jewel tone can take on warmth when it is used in a sunny space and come to life as the light changes throughout the day and into evening when the lamps are on.

It is best to focus on one room at a time when considering what interior design colors to use, that way you can complete one project before moving onto the next without feeling overwhelmed.

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