It’s easy to make a home look like it flows, works well together, and as if it an interior designer stepped in to help you put everything together if you start with a theme. I’m not talking about something crazy, like a Victorian theme or a Georgian theme. One of my favourite things to do is work around a colour scheme. It makes it so much easier to coordinate furniture, accessories, and fixed elements, when you have certain colours to work with.
Since I live in an apartment that I rent, one of my favourite ways to use colour is in my accessories. Think you can’t make a rental space feel like “you”? Here are a few quick, colourful things you can add to your rental place:
- Rugs—especially carpet tiles in a pattern or bold colour. Carpet tiles, like those you can find at FLOR, allow you to create any shape and pattern to suite your space/room configuration. They’re also really easy to move and pack up when you’re ready to leave.
- Curtains—you don’t have to settle for standard, drab rental-place colours like tan or beige. Pick up some fabric in your favourite print or colour and make your own curtains. Finish off the edges with seam tape to keep the fabric from fraying. You can buy clip hooks to attach to your fabric pieces, in order to hang up your new curtains.
- Accessories—I don’t mean just nicknacks. Actually, in a small space (if you have one), I recommend having fewer, higher-impact items. Think about things like artwork, trays (which serve as ways to add pops of colour, as well as a useful function), lampshades, throw cushions, and the like.
The book A Colorful Home, by Susan Hable, shares ways to create a colour scheme that works well for your personality and your space. There are about 200 pages of colour inspiration in this book. I love how it showcases both public and private spaces to give you lots of ideas on ways to add colour to your home.
And can we just talk about the gorgeous spreads and pages with pictures of art supplies for a second? I always love how art supplies being used look. There’s lots of action, creativity, and focused energy—not to mention beautiful colours! In this book, Susan Hable talks about keeping a sketchbook with thick paper around just for painting out colour ideas. I think this is a great idea, which I’d like to borrow.
Some of my favourite pages in A Colourful Home are the ones with the rose palette. While I don’t have a lot of colours like this in my home, I do have some dried roses, which I used to style the following images:
A Colorful Home: Create Lively Palettes for Every Room
