How to Create a Whole House Color Palette
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Creating a whole house color palette is more than just picking paint colors. A home's color story involves upholstery, tables, lighting, accessories, flooring, hardware, all working together to give a home a collected and cohesive look.
Finding your home's color palette (and story) can be simple when following these steps:
Step 1: Find your favorite color, feeling, or thing.
This could be easy for you. Perhaps you wear tones of blue and white every day of the year and gravitate towards these colors at home, too. Maybe, you have an obsessive love of plants, which clearly dictates your home will have green in its color palette. If you're starting from scratch, or have no idea which direction to go in the process of creating a whole house color palette, look for a decor item that speaks to you. A rug, quilt, piece of art, pillow, anything that makes you say, “Oh, I love that!”. That's your jumping off point.
In this example, I'm pulling the color palette from a gorgeous vintage rug. I like to start with five colors, ranging from light to dark.
Once the palette is set, think about the feeling you want your home to have. This will probably change from room to room, so try to focus on the main living area of your home for now. Choose three adjectives to describe the feeling. Bright, happy, cozy? Calm, moody, warm? My three for this moodboard will be: sophisticated, comfortable, fun.
Looking at your color palette, choose the colors that represent the feeling you want to convey. These will be your core colors. For instance, if I had chosen “bright, happy, cozy”, I would pick the three lighter colors for my core colors. If I had chosen “calm, moody, warm”, I'd be looking at the darker end of the palette. For my “sophisticated, comfortable, fun” feeling, I'm going to zero in on the middle colors of navy (sophisticated), brown (comfortable), and yellow (fun). This will be my main whole house color palette, with the darker and lighter colors acting as support.
Step 2: Furniture and Rugs
Once the color palette and feeling have been decided on, you can begin building out the home's color story. In our example the next step is to choose the furnishings, but this may be different depending on your jumping off point. If your chosen “favorite thing” is wallpaper, for instance, you would next want to choose rugs, then furniture, in your color palette. Think of it as building from the ground up (and out), with rugs and furniture as the foundation of your color story.
Keeping my adjectives in mind, I chose furniture from the grayish brown in my color palette. There's a ton of navy and yellow represented in the rugs, and furniture is the perfect place to bring in the “comfortable”. Now, keep in mind that the sofa and cabinet are representative of the home furnishings in general, not that every room must have brown leather, or that exact wood tone. Go a bit darker or lighter, bring the brown into the bedroom with velvet curtains, or choose an upholstered bed in that solid blue rug color. We want variety!
Step 3: Metals
Next up, we're picking the finish of your home's lighting, hardware, and fixtures. While it's perfectly acceptable to use one finish throughout the home (that's right. I said it!), I like to choose 2-3. Your metals work just like your color palette to convey a mood and are an important supporting player in a home's color story. If I had chosen the darker end of my example palette, I may have used polished nickel as my main metal for a contrast pop, and black as an accent for moodiness. The lighter end of the palette would've called for a bronze for contrast, and brass for coziness. With my middle “sophisticated, comfortable, fun” color choices, I'm going to go with black for contrast and antique nickel/pewter for muted sophistication (notice it's also in the cabinet hardware).
Step 4: Art and accessories
Now for the best part! Having a set color palette makes choosing art and accessories easy. All you have to do is choose items with any combination of your colors. It can be your dark, light, or middle colors. A single color, or all five! Let your color palette be your guide and have fun!
Step 5: Picking paint colors
Paint is the last step in creating a color story. It's only once everything else is chosen, can you get an idea how a paint color is going to play in a room. It goes without saying (but I'm going to say it anyway!) that paint colors are specific to the light and space where they're going to be. Green in one room, is blue in another! When deciding on paint colors for your home, a good starting point is to pick a light, medium, and dark tone from your palette. Knowing what you want it to look like is the first step, followed by lots of test swatches to find the paint color that'll get you there.
Here I chose lighter versions of the gray-brown and beige to act as my main paint colors. A whole room (including trim in a different finish) could be painted in Benjamin Moore's London Fog or Steam. Maybe Steam on the walls, London Fog for trim, or vice versa. Adding depth is that incredible grayed out navy. BM Mysterious would look great on cabinetry, or in a moody bedroom.
Now, let's see this color story in action!
From the color story moodboard, you see the sofa, rug, sconces and painting, but the rest are items brought in using the moodboard as a guide. The chair is upholstered in a beige and caramel print. The table lamp and side table are in our black metal color. The coffee table, cabinet and tv stand are in gray-brown wood tones. The Frame TV art, picture frame, throw, vase, bowl and candle holders are all in variations of our palette.
There you have it! I hope this helps you build your own color story. Do you find the process of selecting a color palette easy, or does it drive you bonkers?
Additional sources: chandelier, vintage rug, pulls, knobs, pillow, branches, faux plant
