Your House Can Handle More Colour Than You Think

All images by Dean Hearne

There is a strange thing that happens when we decorate our homes. We will wear red shoes, buy the green coat, save photographs of yellow kitchens and blue living rooms, then come home and paint everything beige.

Colour has somehow become a decorating decision that requires courage. We are told to introduce it carefully. Start with a cushion. Try a vase. Maybe paint the powder room if we are feeling particularly brave.

Meanwhile, some of the most memorable homes completely ignore this advice.

They have yellow walls and burgundy rugs. Blue china beside green glass. Dark wood, patterned curtains, old paintings and lampshades that would never appear together on a mood board. Somehow, instead of feeling chaotic, they feel settled.

Colour tends to become easier when there is enough of it.

One green chair can look conspicuous in a neutral room. Add an old painting with a little green in it, a striped cushion and a stack of books and suddenly your eye stops focusing on the chair. It simply becomes part of the room.

Repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity makes even unusual colours feel comfortable.

This is also why exact matching rarely matters. The greens outside your window are not identical. Olive sits beside chartreuse, brown, grey, yellow and whatever happens to be flowering that week. We accept all of it because variation is what makes the landscape interesting.

Rooms benefit from the same looseness.

Some of the best colours are actually the difficult ones. Tobacco brown. Dirty mustard. Murky green. Dusty pink. Faded terracotta. Colours that sound vaguely terrible when you describe them but become incredibly good when placed beside old wood, brass, art and patterned textiles.

These shades give other things somewhere to land.

And sometimes a colour should be a little unexpected.

A red lampshade in a brown room. Pale yellow on the ceiling. Burgundy dining chairs beside a wood table. Green curtains when blue would have been the predictable choice.

A room becomes much more memorable when every decision has not been perfectly coordinated.

If you are unsure where to begin, look at what you already own.

The rug you refuse to replace. Your grandmother's bowl. The painting you have moved through three houses. The slightly ridiculous lamp you bought at a flea market. Vintage pieces are especially good at revealing colour combinations because their shades have softened with time. A single old rug can contain six imperfect colours that somehow work beautifully together.

Pull one of those colours onto the wall. Repeat another in a cushion. Let the strange little rust colour show up somewhere across the room.

Your home will slowly begin developing its own palette without you ever having to formally choose one.

We have spent years treating neutral rooms as the timeless option, but neutrals have trends too. Beige became grey. Grey became white. White warmed into cream. Taupe and brown quietly returned while everyone pretended they had never left.

So there is little point choosing a colour you feel indifferent about simply because it seems safer.

Paint can be repainted. Chairs can be recovered. Lampshades can be changed. A home is allowed to evolve.

The colours you keep choosing eventually become part of its personality. Maybe every room ends up with a little green. Maybe you cannot resist yellow. Maybe cobalt glass keeps following you home from flea markets.

Those accidental repetitions are often far more interesting than a perfectly planned palette.

Use the colours you keep coming back to. Let a few of them clash slightly. Allow something to be brighter, muddier or stranger than expected.

A beautiful home does not need perfect colour coordination.

It needs enough personality that nobody wonders why you chose beige.

-Juliette