How to Choose Paint Colors for Your Home

I’ve been helping a friend/client nail down the design plans for her new home and in choosing paint colors, I realized that I have a philosophy when it comes to choosing colors for a home, but I’ve never shared it here.  So maybe this will help you with how to choose paint colors for your home.

As you know, I’m a lover of color and do like to use many different colors throughout a home. However, I do not like the feeling of being jarred or surprised when walking from one room to the next. For example, walking into a home with royal blue in the living room, red in the kitchen, and bright yellow in the foyer just sounds like a strobe light-induced migraine waiting to happen. Maybe that kind of combination can be done well, but I have yet to see it…..

On the contrary, I like to use colors in the same saturation family (if that makes any sense). Think of it this way, if I was looking at 4 different color cards, the optimal choices would all be on the same level of each card.

In the example above, all the colors on the third row might be my choices for a home.   The colors blend well with one another and would flow nicely from room to room.  Though this may not work in all situations (because color cards are not always organized/arranged the same and because exceptions can always be made), it certainly is a good starting point for me.

Using my home as an example, here are swatches that represent the main paint colors.

Clockwise from top left: Behr Silver Drop, Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter, Sherwin Williams Sea Salt, Sherwin Williams Mountain Air, Behr Lavender Mist, Sherwin Williams Gibraltar

For the most part, the paint colors are all mildly saturated with the one wild card being the master bedroom paint color, Gibraltar by Sherwin Williams. However, even that is picked up again in the color of the lower cabinets in the kitchen.

There are additional colors used as accents in one or two rooms in my house, like Orange, Deep Teal, Black, Kelly Green, Yellow, & Coral.  Some of those accent colors are used in small doses, like the pale yellow on the kids’ ceiling, and others are used heavily, like green & teal.  I don’t shy away from color in the least bit, but I like to make sure they all flow nicely together.

Seeing color in this way can help anyone choose the right paint colors for almost any project.  Putting all of them side-by-side can be done in the planning phases to help you get a sense of what colors you’ll like and which ones need to be tweaked a bit by moving up or down the color card.  Pretty soon I’ll be posting about how to choose the perfect accent colors to best represent the ‘personality’ of your space.

Hope this helps!