Colour is a powerful - it can change emotions and start your day in a positive light or bore you with an overwhelming feeling of ordinary.
Using colour in your home is such a powerful tool to create a unique feel that sums up who you and your family are and how you walk your way in the world.
So, looking around your home now, what colours do you have, do they please you or did you use them to please others or follow a trend? To make your house feel like a home, it is key to get colours that make you and everyone in your home feel energised, support your emotional wellbeing, encourage rest and peaceful sleep and make living lovely!
There are no right and wrong answers when it comes to choosing colour, only you are qualified to decide what colours suit you best. But you do need to be brave enough to trust your instincts; confidence is key and remember it is only paint, if you hate it you can paint over it again!
Here are a few pointers that will help you discover your colour journey:
Many people have colour blocks when it comes to picking colours for a whole house scheme, we all have high emotional energy towards certain colours, they evoke certain memories or situations throughout our lives that relate to positive or negative emotions. Being aware of this is key to understanding how to move pass this and think objectively about colour. Our need to try and move pass the emotions and look at the colour in its own right, is an important step - it's not magnolia beige's fault that you didn't like being shipped off to scary nannas house when you were younger
Another important factor when thinking about colour schemes is to look at colours and how they make us behave. People tend to focus on creating a mood, but everyone in a house has different ways they show moods; looking at behaviours and how you want each room to hold a behaviour, can then help you look at colours that support behaviours. Look at Colour Psychology. This can be especially effective when there are neuro-diversity emotions in the home.
Colours can look and feel very different in different seasons, so remember to think about natural light and how the light in each room changes during the day and each season. I always use a tester pot on a piece of paper to get a good idea of the end result. Sit with it and think about how you and anyone else in your home feels about the effect of that colour.
Use memory pieces that you have collected along your life journey. Did you and your partner by a piece of art or a bowl on holidays that evokes a special time, a happy, positive memory that always makes you smile. Use these collections of memories to see if there is a correlation in what colours you are drawn to when you are feeling at your best and happiest.
We can sometimes get so involved in the colour scheme and how we want our home to look and feel, we forget about the other people that need to live in it, especially children. This can result in a child's rooms, not having colours that support them and their journey. Talk about the colours that your children like; what colour emotions these colours result in and the proportions you use them in their rooms. Painting a child's room red can lead to a child never relaxing and unwinding as Red is a very excitable, lively colour, subconsciously giving them permission to be active, a compromise is to add colour to their room in pops, so you use the colour when you need them to be lively, for example, a pop of colour in the back of their wardrobe, red hangers or a red study chair or notice board.
Wherever your journey leads you, enjoy the process and take time to make it a mindful journey
Heyworth Gordon can jump in at any point in the process to help – please contact us to find out more.