Colour in interior Design. I could write a book about colour. We are hard wired to utilise one third of our senses to sight. A misconception is that because colour is a physical process through the eyes it is a purely visual phenomenon. However colour is light and light is the source of life. As Faber Birren who was an American colourist observed in 1950:
“Its role in all forms of life is too evident to be either denied or ignored.”
Colour can make us depressed, happy, calm, and stimulated. Interior designers use colour to create all sorts of illusions within a space. In America a prison even painted the cells of violent inmates pink to calm them down with great effect.
When combining colours to make a scheme there are options which need to be considered before making a decision. The three most basic options for an overall scheme are monochromatic, harmonious and contrasting.
For a monochromatic scheme you are using a single colour and is the easiest to handle. This will require well arranged tones, patterns and textures. Strictly speaking any colour can be used in a monochromatic scheme although the addition of a neutral would emphasise the colour details. I have a monochromatic scheme in my home. The colour is a neutral beige with black and a small amount of green as accents and that is it. When it came to wall colour imagine my utter dismay when having spent a fortune on tester pots and the wall looking as though it had an ugly rash, the only colour which did not look too bluish, greenish, pinkish or greyish was…. Magnolia! Me an interior Designer having Magnolia walls? Well, I did give all the others a fair go!
Harmonious schemes combine two or three colours that are adjacent to each other on the colour wheel. These can be blue, blue/green and green. This scheme is soothing to the eye but is a bit more interesting than a monochromatic scheme.
The third option is the contrasting scheme. This is a dramatic combination using two colours which have opposite characteristics. These can be red against green, blue against orange and yellow against purple. In their purest form these colours can have a vibrating effect. This scheme works best by having a neutral base and toning down the colours and using them as accents. All these colours in textures, tones and hues need to be viewed in different lights, but natural light varies dramatically with latitude but is not always the rule.
Muted colours with natural textures tend to be favoured in mid-northern Europe, Japan, North America. The exceptions to this are Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore which are all on or near the equator! Having visited all three of these countries, the interiors have a very soothing minimalism. They rely on natural textures and tones, black being used as an accent to delineate the space. In Japan, the interior schemes are on much the same lines but in warmer colours with controlled splashes of colour in the form of a ‘tokonoma’ which is a shallow alcove for display purposes. I like this way of thinking, no clutter, everything behind cupboard doors, just the tokonoma where the display can be all colours and changed at whim.
People who live further north for example Scandinavia, as in their winter they barely see any daylight, they favour light woods, again neutral shades but with accents of clear green and strong pink and red.
In the Mediterranean, Caribbean, California and Florida the strong mellow light makes clear pastels, strong hues and rich colour much more acceptable.
However no matter what the favoured interior colour is in a particular country, there is no getting away from the fact that some rooms need a lot of help, if they are too small, too tall, too wide or too narrow. Colour in this instance can be used to great effect. If a room is large, in order to bring the walls in, a warm advancing colour could be painted on the walls. Personally, I am not a fan of wallpaper with large patterns or small patterns for that matter. I think it is a hangover from the heady days of mainstream interior design shows on TV where if the room ended up looking like an explosion in a paint factory it pulled in the audiences, good taste would surely never do!
Interior colour schemes especially in ‘boutique’ style hotels seem to be pushing the boundaries and trying to divorce themselves from the neutral, easy on the eye interiors. Instead they are combining for instance shocking pink with lime green, initially this could be seen as ‘quirky’, perhaps not in these days of austerity, because goodness knows, we all need cheering up and let us not forget that the colour for 2010 is – turquoise, I wonder who dreamed that one up!
Written by Anne Stuart
“Its role in all forms of life is too evident to be either denied or ignored.”
Colour can make us depressed, happy, calm, and stimulated. Interior designers use colour to create all sorts of illusions within a space. In America a prison even painted the cells of violent inmates pink to calm them down with great effect.
When combining colours to make a scheme there are options which need to be considered before making a decision. The three most basic options for an overall scheme are monochromatic, harmonious and contrasting.
For a monochromatic scheme you are using a single colour and is the easiest to handle. This will require well arranged tones, patterns and textures. Strictly speaking any colour can be used in a monochromatic scheme although the addition of a neutral would emphasise the colour details. I have a monochromatic scheme in my home. The colour is a neutral beige with black and a small amount of green as accents and that is it. When it came to wall colour imagine my utter dismay when having spent a fortune on tester pots and the wall looking as though it had an ugly rash, the only colour which did not look too bluish, greenish, pinkish or greyish was…. Magnolia! Me an interior Designer having Magnolia walls? Well, I did give all the others a fair go!
Harmonious schemes combine two or three colours that are adjacent to each other on the colour wheel. These can be blue, blue/green and green. This scheme is soothing to the eye but is a bit more interesting than a monochromatic scheme.
The third option is the contrasting scheme. This is a dramatic combination using two colours which have opposite characteristics. These can be red against green, blue against orange and yellow against purple. In their purest form these colours can have a vibrating effect. This scheme works best by having a neutral base and toning down the colours and using them as accents. All these colours in textures, tones and hues need to be viewed in different lights, but natural light varies dramatically with latitude but is not always the rule.
Muted colours with natural textures tend to be favoured in mid-northern Europe, Japan, North America. The exceptions to this are Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore which are all on or near the equator! Having visited all three of these countries, the interiors have a very soothing minimalism. They rely on natural textures and tones, black being used as an accent to delineate the space. In Japan, the interior schemes are on much the same lines but in warmer colours with controlled splashes of colour in the form of a ‘tokonoma’ which is a shallow alcove for display purposes. I like this way of thinking, no clutter, everything behind cupboard doors, just the tokonoma where the display can be all colours and changed at whim.
People who live further north for example Scandinavia, as in their winter they barely see any daylight, they favour light woods, again neutral shades but with accents of clear green and strong pink and red.
In the Mediterranean, Caribbean, California and Florida the strong mellow light makes clear pastels, strong hues and rich colour much more acceptable.
However no matter what the favoured interior colour is in a particular country, there is no getting away from the fact that some rooms need a lot of help, if they are too small, too tall, too wide or too narrow. Colour in this instance can be used to great effect. If a room is large, in order to bring the walls in, a warm advancing colour could be painted on the walls. Personally, I am not a fan of wallpaper with large patterns or small patterns for that matter. I think it is a hangover from the heady days of mainstream interior design shows on TV where if the room ended up looking like an explosion in a paint factory it pulled in the audiences, good taste would surely never do!
Interior colour schemes especially in ‘boutique’ style hotels seem to be pushing the boundaries and trying to divorce themselves from the neutral, easy on the eye interiors. Instead they are combining for instance shocking pink with lime green, initially this could be seen as ‘quirky’, perhaps not in these days of austerity, because goodness knows, we all need cheering up and let us not forget that the colour for 2010 is – turquoise, I wonder who dreamed that one up!
Written by Anne Stuart
Very nice post, thanks for sharing, I personally preffer light colours, always make me feel better.
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