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Grey rooms don’t have to look dull and dingy, but making grey the main colour within a room is something of a bold style choice, and it can be easy to get things wrong and leave yourself with a plain – or worse, cold and unfriendly-feeling – space.
Whether you’re just at the planning stage of trying to determine what colour warms up grey before you get as far as committing to it, or if you’ve already styled or inherited a grey room that needs a bit of help, this blog post is for you.
How do you add warmth to a grey room?
So, how do you add warmth to a grey room? The most obvious approach to this is to weave in some other colours, but this is far from the full story, and the type of colours that can energise a room that feels a little flat might not always be the ones you expect!
As well as exploring colour options, you might also want to look at the type and position of the room’s lighting, the tone of the grey you use, and other ways of making a room feel more warm and welcoming, like bringing in some plants and foliage.
Even using interesting interplays of texture might achieve the end result you’re looking for, which means that there are plenty of options if you’re hesitant to move down the path of adding other colours and shades in any meaningful way to your grey starting point.
How do you brighten up a grey room with poor lighting?
The impact of unsympathetic lighting certainly seems to be amplified in grey rooms, whereas rooms in other tones or shades might well get away with anything short of a flickering fluorescent ceiling panel working against it!
However, getting the lighting right in your grey room can absolutely salvage this common problem, and so think about whether the room needs more light, better positioned lights, or a different type of light, with a warmer colour spectrum and a more diffuse aura.
Does grey make a room look cold, and what colours bring warmth to a room?
Does grey make a room look cold? Not in and of itself, and as is the case for all colours, there are warm and cool toned ones; and this applies to grey too, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent than it does for bolder and brighter shades.
Grey doesn’t automatically come across as cold, but if you do find that this is the underlying effect achieved, you might be exploring options for what colours bring warmth to a room with a lot of grey going on in it.
The obvious suggestions are of course colours in the yellow, orange, peach, and red area of the colour spectrum, but these are far from your only options. Rich cream, light warm coffee, and beige shades can all add warmth to a grey room without overpowering it, nor making the room look busy or as if it has too much going on colour-wise.
Another idea is working with other shades of grey to create a graduated or textured colour effect, which can also remove any suggestion of coldness from the room if you pick the right sort of shades, even though what you’re actually doing in practice here is adding more grey!
How do you add warmth to a grey room with accent colours or statement features?
If you are looking at integrating bolder, brighter, and stronger warm colours to warm up a grey room, you have plenty of choices; and you can decide how much of the room’s visual real estate these colours take up by means of how much of them you use.
Items/areas you might want to think of integrating your accent colours or features into include the skirting boards, cushions and throws, blinds, shelving or other furniture, and more or less anything else that can be made from fabric or painted over too!
