Our Home’s Colour Story
When you’re slowly working on decorating your home, it can easily become overwhelming to make any decisions regarding paint, furniture, and decor. There are a ton of beautiful inspiration images for individual rooms out there, but how do those individual images translate to an entire home? How can you maintain a sense of cohesion and flow in your space without making each room the exact same?
These are all questions I have been asking myself as we slowly (and I mean slowly) settle into our home. Although it can be overwhelming at times, I’m actually a huge fan of slow decorating. It gives you time to determine what is working and what isn’t, encouraging you to be creative as you brew on solutions, and also gives you some sort of project to always work away at.
But sometimes, the slowness of it all can feel overwhelming when you have to make a decision in the moment. Will I still like this by the time we finish? Do I need to pick out this future feature now before I work on this current one? What if they won’t work together later?
What I have found is that the best way to combat this indecisiveness is to create a colour story for your home. That is, to choose a handful of colours that will make up the mood and feel of your home and keep them on record. That doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t change and adapt as you tackle projects, but having the bigger picture – even in such a small way – on hand ensures that you have something to work with and a visual to always come back to when it comes time to make all of your decisions.
Your home’s colour story can be whatever you want it to be. It can be one or two colours. It can be ten colours. It can be no colour. Regardless of what you choose, making some sort of plan allows you to visually see how your colour choices work together, ensuring that you have the sense of cohesion and flow I mentioned above while also providing a framework for how to incorporate additional colours when the time comes to do so.
Our home’s colour story looks like this:
Our home is primarily comprised of neutral colours. The main colour used throughout is a cool-toned white called Falling Snow by Behr. This main colour is used in our living and dining room, our hallways, and our office. I love choosing a white as the main colour because you are able to create a bright and versatile backdrop for other design moments to shine (like an accent wall or a beautiful artwork).
Our secondary colours are colours that are applied to a single room or two. They are also primarily neutral (with the exception of Vineland by Benjamin Moore), but create some variety so our home isn’t entirely white. Although it may seem like there are a handful of secondary colours, it is important to note that these colours work together because they have similar undertones. Whether grey, cream, or black, all of the secondary colours have a green undertone. Also, it’s worth noting that these colours are all used in separate rooms, so although they flow together, they are never compared right next to one another.
Our accent colours are warm and bright, which creates some visual contrast with the other colours in our home’s colour story. This is exactly why I chose them. You can use accent colours in subtle ways or bold ways, depending on your style, but the two accent colours we use are both warmer and moodier tones, which compliment the cool green undertones of our primary and secondary colours. You can use accent colours in the form of paint or simply use them as a guide for adding other accents, like textiles, rugs, artwork, or furniture. We’ve used ours for both.
I carry the paint chips of our home’s colour story around in my purse so I can easily draw on them when making decisions. We still have a few rooms in our home that are completely untouched, like our main floor powder room and our kitchen, so those rooms don’t quite fit the colour story of our home yet. But when it comes time to tackle those rooms, it will be so much easier for us to choose colours that will work with the rest of our home by pulling out the swatches and drawing on what we already have established.
Does your home have a colour story? I’d love to see what colours you are drawn to and how that plays into the big picture of your home design. It may be one of the most basic decisions you make, but it truly lays the foundation for the feel and the flow of your home.
Sources: Main – Falling Snow (Behr) // Secondary – Sawgrass (Behr), Vineland (BM), Alaskan Skies (BM), Swiss Coffee (Behr), Deep River (BM) // Accents – Spicy Mustard (BM), Aztec Brick (BM)
