Understanding Colour When Decorating Your Home

When it comes to interior decorating ideas, you need to take into account the colour of your floor. Whether you've opted for a light or dark floor, or one that strikes a balance and provides freshness in the summer and warmth in the winter, decorating the rest of the room needs to compliment your choice of flooring. Below we explore the varying undertones to be used with the choice of flooring that adorns your rooms.

Don't despair, finding the right colours to match the tones in your flooring might feel like a challenge, but it doesn't have to be if you're given the right information. First, you need to choose your floor, whether you've gone for carpet, solid hardwood, engineered wood or laminate flooring. And within each of these groups are choices in grain, density and richness of colour.

Warm or cool colours?

Before choosing your wall colour, you need to decide whether your floor has warm or cool undertones, and then how you want these to be complemented across the room. Warm floors will have comforting shades of yellow, orange and red undertones. Whereas cooler floors have grey or taupe undertones.

Use a colour wheel to understand how to match, contrast and complement your chosen colour in your room. To begin using the colour wheel, find your floor's most prominent colour and use the wheel to find the colours that'll really make your decor stand out.

Source: Interior Style Hunter

Warm colour scheme

If your wood floor has warm undertones, then you can use any warm colour for the wall to really make your room cosy. Not only will you gain a cosy space perfect for any bedroom or lounge, but your furniture will need the same attention to detail.

Cool colour scheme

Cool colours will chill you out nicely in the hotter months and complement any cooler flooring. Whether you are looking at icy pastel shades or a darker winter palette, go for blue, violet and various shades of green. As with warmer colours, mix the shades to create vibrant spaces. One of the most popular cool room design ideas is aqua blue on the walls with orange-toned hardwood floors.

Warm and cool decorating

You can pair a warm coloured wall with a cool floor by going for a medium-bright to dark paint. By combining a warm colour with an intense cool colour, the colour remains vibrant despite the floor’s cool undertone. A pumpkin-coloured wall paint combined with grey-toned hardwoods is a great pair that you can put together to create a striking warm-and-cool mix.

Related: What Colours Go With Which Shade Of Laminate Flooring?

Dark colour scheme

For those who want to create a sophisticated look to their space, you may have opted for a dark-toned wood. It helps to bring richness to the room. There is no denying that when paired with the wrong furnishing, dark woods can make the space look gloomy and heavy. However, make sure your wood furniture matches the warm undertones of your wood floor but is a few shades later – this also applies to your flooring.

What colour scheme features in your house decorating ideas? Let us know in the comments.