Does your home have its colour story straight?
Real Homes magazine
April 2020
Discover how to use colour successfully
Take a wander around your home: does it feel like it’s made up of individual rooms, each having its own strong look but not one cohesive style? Just how can you make rooms flow effortlessly from one to another? The answer, as I discovered for the May issue of Real Homes magazine, has a lot to do with ‘the red thread’, or as it’s known in Scandinavia, ‘röda tråden’.
For this commission, I turned to the advice of three great colour experts: Andrea Curtis, artist, designer and colour consultant; Amy Jones, interior designer at Greta Mae, and Emily Murray, author of Pink House Living and writer of the award-winning The Pink House blog.
As Amy told me, ‘Colour repetition is one of the most important elements to design, as it can stop a house feeling disjointed. Such repeat of colour helps create a cohesive scheme, bringing all of the rooms together to feel like a home, rather than individual rooms leading off a hallway. It’s a fairly easy approach to take – most simplistically look for a key colour or texture and repeat.’
In my home, I’m starting to build a new colour story, one that feels much softer than previous attempts and I’ll be practising what I preach. I’m loving those of-the-moment soft putty shades (like in the above pic from Little Greene), which I’m going to add to a predominantly grey base. Then I think I’ll add touches of ochre for warmth, along with lots of natural textures. I’ll let you know how I get on over on Instagram. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this from Andrea…
“Your hallway should be where your colour story begins – even your front door should be painted a colour that sets the mood for the interior”
You can read the full feature in the May issue of Real Homes, on sale here.
