Are you choosing colours for your home and not sure how to do this, or what to consider when making your selections?

Here’s 7 tips for choosing colours for your home, for both your interiors and exteriors.

Hello! This is Episode 226, and in it, I’m going to be doing an update to one of Year 4’s most popular episodes and continuing our celebration of 5 years of the “Get it Right” podcast.

In the last episode, I shared a reboot of the most popular episode from Year 4 of the podcast. It was from Season 11, which was called “Interior Design Basics”. And the episode was my interview with Karen Haller, who is a Colour Psychologist.

It was a fantastic conversation all about how colour can enhance our lives in and beyond our homes, and our knowledge of colours, and how we respond to them, as a vehicle for creating environments that truly suit you and support you.

If you haven’t listened to the reboot of that episode, it’s definitely worth checking it out. You can find it at www.undercoverarchitect.com/225 and there’s a free downloadable transcript available as well.

In this episode, I’m going to be talking more about choosing colours for your home, and sharing some of my tips from doing this for hundreds and hundreds of homes over the years – including my own.

(Note: The PDF transcript for this episode contains photographs and project examples to help illustrate the tips described in this episode).

Whether it’s for your interiors or exteriors, choosing paint colours for your home can feel like a HUGE decision.

In some ways it is. Depending on your home, it can be a big undertaking to paint and repaint it. Especially if it’s the exterior and you have ladders and scaffolding involved, or it’s the interior with high ceilings. 

Paint, however, can be one of the simplest and most transformative ways to change the look and feel of your home, both inside and out. And it can be something you can regularly change if you wish, far more easily than the materials of your exteriors and interiors.

My mum is a big believer in this. In the house I grew up in, she would paint and repaint – inside and outside – a lot. She worked full time, and would often come home, sort dinner out, and then get up a ladder to paint until late at night. 

Sometimes it was a big, dramatic change in colour. Sometimes it was more subtle. People in the neighbourhood would laugh at how they’d get a shock to see the outside of our home looking so different and not knowing if they were at the right house. 

She’s still like this – in her 70s she’s still painting her home to create an entirely different look and feel. She always says “it’s only paint and a weekend’s work!” And she’s always been quite brave with colour as a result.

This is the thing. The spectrum of colour we can choose from in our lives and homes is HUGE. 

Go to any Hardware and you’ll see a wall of hundreds of different colours you can choose from, and you’re only scratching the surface of what’s actually available. There are literally thousands and thousands of colours to select from when choosing what colour to paint your interiors and exterior with. 

And yet, drive the streets and neighbourhoods and most homes are white and grey – or a version of that – inside and out. We usually choose monochromatic tones or muted natural colours. 

I think we do that because paint feels like a big commitment, and something you don’t want to be re-doing anytime soon. 

And so, we choose safe colours that don’t seem too directional, and that we think we can live with long-term. 

However, if you listened to my conversation with Karen in the last episode, or you have read her book, you’ll know what she says about blacks, greys and whites. I know I’ve definitely been more aware of my colour choices and really interested when I choose black, grey and white generally. 

In fact, I’m recording this in the few days before Christmas, and I’m sitting here now in an all grey outfit … clearly needing some zoning ‘off’, during a time of year that has a lot going on. 

Check out my previous episode if you need to hear what Karen says about greys and whites and what they say about you and where you’re at personally.

The Dulux Colour Forecasts for the last few years have told a different story though. Especially over the last couple of years, as we’ve been living through super unusual times in lockdown, and spending WAY more time in our homes than we’re used to. The colours being put forward in the fantastic Dulux Colour Forecasts have been rich tones, much stronger and bolder, and the Dulux imagery they present really celebrates this gorgeous range of colour combinations.

In Season 11, I spoke with Andrea Lucena-Orr from Dulux (link to the right episode in Season 11), who heads up the team that puts together each annual Colour Forecast, so if you haven’t listened to that episode, do check it out. I’ll put the link in the podcast resources for you. It’s great to hear how and why they come up with the Colour Forecasts they do, and how they seek to be really representative of the feelings and experience of the time they’re created in. 

So how about you? 

Are you feeling you’ll be brave with colour when it comes to your home’s interior and exterior, and choose some bolder, stronger tones? Or are you feeling you want a more monochromatic palette? Or some subtle, muted colours that are softer and more discrete?

Let me now share seven tips with you to help you choose colours for your home, and think about how you’ll arrange them as well – whether it’s for your interiors or your exteriors.

Listen to the episode now.

RESOURCES:

Season 9 podcast episode

• Why naming your style can be dangerous >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-what-style-is-my-house/

Season 11 podcast episodes

• Choosing the right colour with Dulux (interview with Andrea Lucena Orr) >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-id101-dulux-colour/
• What to know about interior paint with Josh Plautz, Dulux >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-id101-dulux-paint/
• Jessica Bellef interview Part 1 >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-id101-individual-jessica-bellef-part-1/
• Jessica Bellef interview Part 2 >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-id101-individual-jessica-bellef-part-2/

Other resources

• 9 things to know about your front door >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/home-design-9-things-to-know-about-front-door/
• Images of Anderson Project and monochromatic colour scheme to highlight different architectural forms >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/how-to-extend-a-home/