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What are the best colours to add to your home? This depends on what you want to achieve. Making a home look light and airy would call for different shades than making a home feel warm and snuggly, and if you’re planning to redecorate your home with a view to selling it or renting it out, you’d want to look in a whole different direction again.
This blog post will share some pointers on the best colours to add to homes for different purposes, and why this is.
How can I add more colour to my house?
First up, if you’re looking for ways to add colour and interest in general rather than seeking pointers on the best specific colours to use in your home, you have absolutely tonnes of options, some of which offer a lot of bang for very little buck.
Assuming you’re trying to avoid shelling out on a full redecoration, there’s plenty of scope to bring the colours of your choice into literally any room in either a large or a small way.
For soft furnishings, this can be in the form of throws and cushions, then you’ve also got options for ornaments, artwork, frames, light shades/fittings and even coloured lightbulbs themselves; and of course, adding colour by means of your blinds or curtains.
Blinds and/or curtains can take up quite a reasonable amount of the visual space in a room, and so the colours you choose for these can have a big impact.
If you’re not against the idea of doing some minor redecorating too (but still don’t want to go too mad) than painting the skirting boards or accents in the room in your chosen colour, particularly if this matches your blinds, can bring everything together really neatly too.
What are the best colours to add to your home to make it feel warm and cosy?
If your aim is to make a room or your home as a whole feel cosy, warm, snuggly, or “hygge” as seems to be the trend of recent years, the first thing you need to know is that achieving your goal is less about the colours you pick and more about the tones.
One of the very first things most of us learnt in primary school art lessons is that red is warm and blue is cold; and some of us instinctively knew that this was not necessarily the case, although most of us got programmed to think along these lines nonetheless.
You can absolutely have warm toned blues, and cold toned reds; and I reckon that now I’ve said that, it’s obvious, even if you too were previously catfished into thinking some colours were by nature cold and some warm.
Any colour can be either warm or cool toned, depending on the shade; take yellow, for example. Lemon yellow can fairly be called cool in tone, while the yellow of an egg yolk is warm.
All of this is my way of priming you to understand that the colours that will make a home feel warm and cosy are those with warm tones, rather than specific colours per se.
This means that if you’re into blues and greens more than red and yellows, you can totally work these into a warm and cosy theme just as effectively, as long as you pick blues and greens with warm tones.
What are the best colours to add to your home to make it feel light and airy?
There are a few different approaches here; either using light, pale, and neutral colours which tend to open up a space regardless of how small it is, using cooler toned shades (but not necessarily outright cold ones, as “light and airy” and “making a room feel cold” are not the same thing) or using graduating colours.
My first two suggestions there more or less explain themselves, but the graduating colours thing? This means using colour effects such as fading from darker to lighter shades, or working from darker to lighter shades (or vice versa) either across a room, or up and down the walls or levels of the room.
As you might expect, this does take some vision and work to get right but is a very innovative and clever way to make a smaller space feel larger, or to make a room feel more open, if a lack of windows rather than a lack of space is the issue.
You don’t have to stick to pale or light shades to make a room feel light; but anything overly dark or rich will tend to work against you. Bringing outdoor colours in, like light to mid blues and light to mid-coloured greens and teals, as well as wood and wood tones, all work well in this respect too.
What are the best colours to add to your home to make it feel happy and welcoming?
To make your home feel happy, welcoming, comforting, and generally positive, I refer you back once more to the first section, “what are the best colours to add to your home to make it feel warm and cosy,” regarding tones and shades… Rather than thinking in terms of specific colours to seek out or avoid.
With that said though, there really are some colours that most people agree are happy ones – yellow, orange, peach, warm-toned pinks and lilacs and so on – and those that most people think of as being more sombre or, if not quite unhappy exactly, perhaps not strictly full of joy either. Grey, for instance.
Reds and blues can go either way when it comes to happy colours to add to your home; rich, warm shades towards the darker side of both work well, but the wrong red can be overpowering or even aggressive-seeming, and the wrong blue, a little cold and morose.
Which colour combination is best for houses or apartments you’re looking to sell or rent out?
Finally, if you’re preparing your home for sale or decorating or renovating a property with a view to renting it out, what are the best colours to add to your home to make it appealing to your prospective buyers or tenants?
Always head for neutrals here; magnolia might be a bit cliché these days in this respect, but it became ubiquitous enough a paint shade to become a stereotype for a reason!
If you’re trying to make a house or apartment appeal to someone other than yourself, you couldn’t possibly appeal to every possible taste or preference. But you can allow your prospective buyer or renter to imagine their own style when they enter the home, by presenting them with more or less a blank canvas that leaves scope for them to put their own personal stamp on it when they say yes and move in.
Any of the neutral colour groups including creams, beiges, and greys are a sound choice for redecorating a room or house you plan to rent out or sell. Anything much wilder or bolder than this can actually work against you to a degree, as it makes it harder for others to envision alternative presentations of the space that could very easily be achieved in reality.
