Many people love color and wouldn't dream of living in a home decorated with boring white, gray, or beige walls, furniture, or accessories.
If you want to decorate your home with many colors, you need to be careful that the decor looks sophisticated and does not look juvenile or overwhelming.
Here are some interior designer tips & tricks for decorating a room with many colors to get a design magazine worthy result.
Jumping Off Point
Instead of just picking a lot of random colors for your room that you like, start with a color jumping off point that will help solidify your color scheme.
This item will help make your color selections look cohesive and your room thoughtfully designed.
The jumping off point should be one large item that has many colors in it.
You will use all or many of the colors in your large item for other decorative items in your room, so make sure you love it!
The jumping off point item could be a colorful rug, colorful artwork, or a colorful fabric used on a large furniture piece or curtains.
Avoid Primary Colors
Decorating your home with only primary colors (basic red, blue, and yellow) can easily start to make your home look juvenile and basic. Decorating with one or two primary colors is fine, as long as you use them in combination with other colors.
For a more mature and sophisticated color scheme, decorate your home with unique and more interesting colors that are less common.
You might enjoy colors such as blush. robin's egg blue, marigold, burgundy, turquoise, aqua, sea green, cranberry, emerald, coral, lavender, navy, eggplant, fuschia, teal, mauve, indigo, mocha, copper, and/or nectarine instead.
Color Mixing
Instead of having all of your colors used in equal amounts, select one color to be the dominant color.
The dominant color should be used more than the other colors since using all of your colors in equal amounts can look a little too prescripted and feel boring.
Also consider having one secondary color to be used more than the other colors, excluding the dominant color.
The other colors can be used in smaller quantities on such items as accessories and smaller furniture pieces.
Also, use different shades (darker versions = the color mixed with black) and tints (lighter versions = the color mixed with white) of your colors for a more complex and sophisticated color palette.
Add Black and White for Contrast
Well decorated rooms have a balance of dark, light, and mid toned colors for optimum contrast.
To check your room's contrast, take a photo of your room and convert it to black & white.
Your photo should look 10-25% black, 10-25% white, and 50-80% gray.
That doesn't mean that you need to decorate with black - dark colors like navy or charcoal gray should look black in a black & white photo. You also don't need to decorate with white - any very light color will look white in a black & white photo.
If your room looks all gray, then add dark and/or light accents to increase the contrast and make your room more visually pleasing.
Avoid Busy Prints
When decorating with prints, designers typically use prints of different sizes so the patterns do not compete with themselves.
You can use one large scale print (maybe a floral), one medium scale print (maybe a stripe), and one small scale print (maybe a houndstooth).
Since you are using many colors, try to limit the amount of patterns that you use so that the color and pattern mixing does not look too overwhelming.
Solid colored textural items (velvet, linen, etc) tend to look best in very colorful rooms.
Small scale fabrics with many colors tend to look muddy from a distance and can make the room feel too overpowering and uninviting, especially when using several different small scale colorful fabrics.
