f you think that you can just pick up an accent color for your living room or bedroom with ease, you may be in for a surprise. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Mastering the accent color is the secret super power of great interior designers. However, if you can find the delicate balance of adding accent colors to your home, you can really make the most boring color pallet come alive. We’ll be looking at how to pick accent colors for a room in more detail below so you can save time, money and the potential headache of looking out of place.
6 Secrets to Picking Accent Colors For Your Home
Tip 1 – Flexibility On Picking Accent Colors
You don’t have to pick one color. If your home is predominantly neutral and then there are just pops of purples for example or splashes of navy throughout, your space is still going to feel generic and bland as well as overly matching. And, to be honest, this will look pretty boring. Instead, choose something to pull from. Is there a painting or a pillow fabric you have on display that your accent colors can reference back? Ideally, you would start with your neutral basic color palette and then identify two or three colors you want to be reappearing throughout the space.
If you want to go even deeper, you can have those two or three colors appear in other areas of the home, in different ways so that you can also get a pleasant, cohesive flow from one room to the next. And, maybe that means eggplant throw pillow in the living room, eggplant vase in the kitchen, eggplant blanket on your sofa or bed. But that can’t be it. Otherwise, suddenly your home is going to feel like a weird beige and purple zebra skin!
We recommend blending in different colors. For example, you can add a glassy green pillow on the sofa, pale glassy green walls in the bedroom and maybe a painting or a fabric print that calls back all those colors. The idea is to achieve a balance. Not too much of any color. Identify a couple of colors you like in combination and then figure out how to apply different quantities of each. Make sure you distribute those colors evenly throughout your space, without feeling overwhelming or overdone in certain areas.
Tip 2 – Make It Easy For Yourself
For your own sanity and ease, put your accent color on things that you can change. This is one of the greatest benefits of keeping your palette neutral and understated. If allows you to swap up your current accent colors if you got tired of them without having to buy a new sofa or repaint the whole room. And, if you start feeling really ambitious, you can swap out your accent colors based on seasons! Again only if you are feeling ambitious!
Tip 3 – Collective Colors
When looking at how to pick accent colors for a room, consider picking colors based on how they look collectively, not just based on your preference for the individual colors. For example, red and green screams Christmas, no matter how well you position your colors. Red and blue shouts Nautical unless you have a really good gift of mixing them out with neutral tones to mellow them down. Think about unexpected colors such as rusty orange, slate blue, various shades of yellow or greens.
Tip 4 – Reconsider an Accent Wall
Sometimes you may think that you absolutely “need” an accent wall. If you think strongly about having an accent wall, think twice. The application of an accent wall is a tricky one. You really need just the right spot for it, or it will just end up feeling like a 2007. So give it some real consideration to your permanent accent colors.
Tip 5 – You’re Not Tied Down To Just One Color
Once you made a decision on your accent color, don’t think that this means you can only use one of these colors. Your accent colors are meant to be recurring colors that keep popping up throughout your home. It doesn’t mean they have strict monopoly on color. We encourage you to add a little diversity to your pallet with unexpected splashes.
Don’t buy a vase you love because it isn’t purple and your primary color accent color is purple. And definitely don’t buy a vase or painting you don’t like just because it’s purple. The key here is to maintain a balance this way your home feels more collected and authentic. The message here is clear, don’t fill your home with various objects just because they are the same color as your accent wall!
Tip 6 – Add a Bold Furniture Color
Consider painting a piece of furniture in a bold color. Breadking away from the wood-on-wood palette of most caseloads can be a terrific way to add a little pizazz to your home. Take one of your more weathered furniture pieces and follow our instructions on How to Paint Pine Furniture for example for easy DIY steps. A bold or bight color can be a perfect way to add a little pop in an unexpected way. The only downside to this is that pillows are much easier to change colors out than dressers colors. So, if you decide to take the plunge on this, make sure it’s the color that you really want and that works otherwise, you’ll be repainting again in a few years.
Here you have it: how to pick accent colors fo a room. Follow the above and you should be in good shape when it comes to how to pick the right accent color for a room in your house. If in doubt, take a few days to reconsider colors and the actual accent wall that you’re considering. Expect to repaint again until you get the perfect color match throughout your house. Don’t forget to be open to other colors also and to add a few bold furniture pieces.
Let us know how your accent wall turned out. We’ll love to hear the steps you followed.
