Pick colors to fit the season – with Blue Door Painters decorating advice
Fall is the time of year for warm colors. Reds, oranges, yellows, and browns – accented wherever you need a bright “pop” with the searing light blue of the Washington, DC fall sky, or the white of those puffy clouds that cruise in with the blessedly dry cool fronts.
Warm colors are also an excellent choice for winter. Research has shown that the psychological ‘temperature’ of a room’s interior – determined entirely by the decorating scheme – has a strong impact on the appeal of that room during the extreme seasons. People have a strong preference for cool blues, greens, and violets during the hot summer – and for the cozy warmth of the classic fall palette during the frigid winter.
To get your interior ready for the changing seasons, consider adding some warm colors into your design scheme. Whether you are ready to go all in and warm up all or part of your interior with a whole new paint job, or you only want to focus on the details and make small changes that can be reversed when the earth comes back around in its orbit and the temperature starts warming up again, incorporating warmth into your design scheme is a sophisticated psychological strategy for dealing with the changing season.
A few tips:
– If you have any wood in your interior, bring out the red, orange, or yellow highlights in that wood (if you want to, you can actually bring in a sample of your wood and have a paint store match the color for you – modern color mixing technology is incredibly advanced) by painting, choosing rugs, draperies, and furniture covers, or even by tweaking the simple details in your interior like centerpieces and decorations. Echoing the warm tones that are already present in your wood will give your design scheme an organic feel that will help you stay relaxed and enhance the sense of security and protection against the winter elements.
– Harmonize with your existing colors. While warming up a room by choosing an entirely new paint scheme is not necessarily a bad investment (especially in dining rooms, kitchens, and lively gathering rooms where you want to encourage energy), if you don’t want to go that far, you can mix some warm colors into your existing decoration scheme by painting trim or accents, or choosing warm-toned decorations or linens. You just need to be careful that your new colors look good with the color scheme that you already have. You can almost always add a warm color into the scheme you have, you just need to find the color that is oriented on the color wheel either close to, or directly across from, the main color in your decorating scheme. Also condier your variations in the chroma and value; if you have a dull-toned, light-colored room, you may want to avoid bright colors so that they do not appear garish.
– Maximize light with color conturing. As the days grow darker, it’s time to make your interior grow lighter. Using light colors makes an area feel more spacious – an important antidote to the stir-crazy that often comes with winter. Remember that the impact of color is multiplied by the amount of space that that color covers; you would be surprised what a large difference it makes to simply choose a color that is several shades lighter than your existing main color, if you are painting a very large space.