Choosing a colour scheme for your house is a cornerstone of good interior design. Colours have a huge impact on our mood and headspace, and picking the wrong colours can really dampen the entire experience of the home.
However choosing a colour scheme for your house can feel overwhelming. With so many colours, interior styles, trends, and advice floating around, it can be confusing to know what colours to choose or how to go about choosing them in the first place.
This guide was written to help you get to the bottom of what colours you should go for for your interior - we hope it helps!
Step 1: Consider the mood you want your interior to bring
For the first and most basic step, consider what mood you want your interior to bring. Do you want it to feel uplifted? Relaxed? Energized? Or serene?
The mood you want to bring to the house will have an impact on your choice of colour. And while we undoubtedly want to feel a range of emotions inside the home, this exercise is more to understand what emotion you want the interior to speak through the colours chosen.
Step 02: Consider what's staying
Next, record a baseline of what is staying in the house so your colour scheme can work around it, not clash against it.
For example, if you have a specific coloured floor and you're not interested in replacing the flooring, note the colour down. Do this for any fittings, fixtures, and finishes in the house that you don't want to spend money renovating.
Noting here that the bigger the item visually, the more you need to take note. Something like flooring or kitchen benchtop colours you need to give significant consideration to as they take up a lot of visual space, however you can probably ignore a oddly coloured laundry tap.
Step 03: Create a moodboard of styles/images you like
Now for the fun part - find and save pictures of interiors you love. Take note of the interior styles and colours you're drawn to. Are you loving Japandi? Maybe you have a strong pull to organic modern? Or are you really into mid-century maximalism?
Generally speaking the style you choose go with with may have an impact on your final colour choices. For example the Japandi style tends to have a lot of light coloured wood & white/cream, while organic modern is often heavy on the wood shades, greens, and creams.
That's not to say you can't do any interior style in any colour scheme you want, but you may be limited by the colour of furniture available on the market for a specific style. You could always go the DIY repainting/upholstering route if you wanted - but this is a commitment you'd need to be prepared to make.
Step 04: Consider your favourite colours
Next, consider what colours you naturally love. Now, a caveat here is that not all colours we love is something we want to experience in our interior. Make sure you actually want to live around those colours.
For example your favourite colour might be black, but black tends to visually close up smaller rooms, and it's a hassle to keep clean as it shows every speckle of dust or fingerprint. You might opt to use it as an accent/detail colour, but avoid picking large furniture items in the colour.
Step 05: Choose a base colour
It's time to pick a base colour.
Your base colour will be the fallback colour for the whole space, and it should give the other colours you pick a chance to stand out. Unless you're experienced with interior design, we suggest choosing a neutral, light base. A white or cream/ivory is best, as you can build most colour schemes from this base.
Consider the colour of your floors when choosing a base. If your floors have an overly warm undertone, we recommend swapping to a cooler or neutral wall colour to balance out the room, and vice versa.
Step 06: Pick the rest of your colours from the colour wheel
The colour wheel is bible when it comes to choosing colours. Rules are made to be broken, but the colour wheel is a hard rule to break succesfully.
You want to pick 3-4 colours max to compliment your base colour, otherwise it will start feeling chaotic. You have a few options on how to pick those colours:
Monochrome - You can choose to go monochrome with your favourite colour, and pick items that are on all different hues and shade ranges of that colour.
Analogue - You can also pick 2 colours adjacent to each other on the colour wheel, for example yellow & green.
Complimentary - Finally, you can choose to pick two complimentary colours, which are colours that sit opposite each other on the colour wheel. This option will give you the most contrast in your interior.
Which option you pick will depend on the mood you want to set with your interior. For example, if you want it to feel relaxing - you'll probably want to go with a beige/white/cream situation. If you want it to feel uplifting - you'll want to go for something like a brighter orange.
Step 07: Consider each room when picking colours
One important side note is colours can look very different room to room depending on the lighting in the room. North facing rooms will generally be able to have any colours look nice, while south facing rooms are darker and cooler undertoned naturally, which means you may need to warm them up through the paint & furniture undertones.
*Noting I am in the Southern Hemisphere, so if you're in the Northern Hemisphere the opposite applies.
Step 08: Find paint, furniture, fixtures that match the colour scheme
And finally, for the execution. Now that you have all that information, it's time to put it all together. Start looking for items that match the colour scheme and start to bring the vision to life. Some general notes/rules to follow:
- Try to swap and change colours or undertones in each different area - e.g. don't have a corner of beige, and then a corner of pink (unless this is what you're going for of course!). Try to bring in the different colours throughout the space and create contrast by offsetting them against each other.
- Don't get hung up on exact shades matching. Different undertones, hues, textures etc. of the same colour thrown around a room is what bring cohesion and interest to the space, so don't overthink it too much.
- Try to bring different textures through in the same shades - this really pulls a place together and brings in a lot of visual interest to a space.
And that is all! That is how you come up with an interior colour scheme.
I hope you've enjoyed this blog post and leave a comment below if you have any questions.
