In contemporary interior design, the art of color coordination is paramount. Many people struggle with matching furniture colors, especially if they're not naturally attuned to hues. Let's explore some tips to help you create a visually appealing space.
1. Coordinating Furniture with Ambient Colors
A popular adage in the design world suggests a simple rule for furniture color coordination: “Light walls, medium floors, and dark furniture, or vice versa.” This principle ensures that the space doesn’t feel top-heavy with lighter colors.
Visually, the floor, furniture, and walls are positioned at the low, middle, and high levels of a room. It’s essential to create a sense of contrast and gradation in the vertical space to make the room stand out.
Contrast is achieved by pairing light and dark colors, while gradation is created by combining a color with its mid-range counterpart. Color depth refers to the brightness or lightness of a color. When black is added to a color, its brightness decreases, making it darker. Conversely, adding white increases brightness, making the color lighter.
For instance, if your walls are white and the floor is yellow, which is a light wall and medium floor, opt for darker furniture tones like dark red or dark green. If the walls are light gray and the floor is dark red, which fits the medium wall and dark floor scenario, choose lighter furniture colors such as pink or light yellow.
2. Color Coordination for Similar Furniture Pieces
When it comes to coordinating colors for furniture that belongs to the same category, such as a main sofa, side sofas, chairs, coffee tables, and TV stands, it’s best to choose colors that are adjacent to the color wheel.
For example, if your coffee table is blue, consider a TV stand in shades of blue, dark blue, or sky blue. Once you’ve chosen a base color, you can adjust its depth by adding black or white to achieve a harmonious look.
Suppose you’ve selected a dark red for your main sofa. By removing the black from the dark red, you get red, red-orange, and orange as adjacent colors. To these, add an equal amount of black to create the color palette for your side sofas, such as dark red, earthy yellow, or brown.
By understanding these principles, you can confidently choose furniture colors that create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing environment in your home.
