When it comes to fitting out your favorite rooms in the house, it is important to make them inviting. Today people do not spend enough time thinking about how to decorate their home and in particular the color combinations. You will spend more time in your home than anywhere else (maybe the office wins) and when you come home from a long hard day at work, you want to be able to relax. Here we lay out some tricks to make your home an inviting warm place to be.
The key to making your home a comfortable and warm environment is color. By using warm colors you can make your home breathe like an intimate space. The first thing you must understand is what exactly warm colors are. People can be very confused about what defines a warm color and a cool color and if they get the balance wrong it can give a room the entirely wrong feel.
There are some easy tricks to knowing what a warm and cool color is. Take a traditional color wheel. It pretty much splits in half between warm colors and cold colors. The warm colors are everything in the range of red, orange, yellow, mustard and gold. The cool colors are the blues, greens, and purples. However, there are shades of both that cross the line. A bright yellow can be a cool color just like a dark and intimate navy could be a warm color. This is why it doesn’t always come down to the color but sometimes the tone. Earthy tones are naturally warm while cooler colors are anything that brings an airy feel to the room.
White and gray are two interesting colors in this regard. While you might class white as a cool color and gray as a warm, it is not so simple. Both can be warm or cool. White, for example, can have soft undertones depending on the shade that you get. A warm white can be an incredibly subtle yet powerful way to transform a room. At the same time white with undertones of blue can be fresh and cool and brighten up a corner of a room or a bathroom with incredible effects. The same is true for gray. Maybe now you are starting to realize why there are 52 shades of white.
Lighting in each room plays a huge role as well. This is why you must always test some colors on a wall to see how it fits. When testing colors ensure you put enough on the wall to get a sense of how it fits the room. Natural light always makes a room cooler, artificial light always makes a room warmer.
Despite what we have said already, don’t feel that you need to make a room with only bright colors and another room with only warm colors. The interplay and balance of these two times are what really bring a room together. Whatever you choose as the dominant theme of a room (warm or cool) should be the dominant color but you can then use subtle hints of the opposite them to really bring a room together. Picture a cool bathroom with white walls with undertones of blue. Now add a red rug to the room to ground it a little bit and make it more inviting.
As a rule of thumb, it is a good idea to use cold colors on the walls and ceiling and then use warm colors in the furniture and fittings of a room. This tends to produce a lovely balance between a fresh and clean home with inviting undertones.
