Jo Reynolds
So without further ado, here’s our current house’s color palette as it stands now (we still have to paint the guest bathroom and the spare room). It’s not too easy to see all of the colors (ex: the back of the dining room built-ins are dark teal, but it’s not as easy to see those little slivers of color in the image below as well as the office stencil and Clara’s closet stencil) but it was fun to play around in photoshop and make an updated floor plan for this house’s paint picks so far. The cool thing we’ve realized is that most of our rooms with brightly colored walls tend to have a few more neutral choices to balance things out (ex: our greeny-yellow walled kitchen has white cabinets/counters and a soft gray backsplash with brown cork floors).
Especially in a smaller home with some pretty tiny rooms, keeping things flow-y and neutral was really helpful when it came to making it feel open and airy. Our current house is larger, so a few hits of color among the other more toned down walls make us happy (and don’t seem to chop things up as much as they could in a smaller floor plan). We’ve actually seen lots of pretty homes with the same exact color on every wall of the entire house (whether it’s a crisp white tone, a soft tan color, a taupey-gray, or even something more daring like celery, yellow, or a muted blue-gray tone everywhere).
I think we like to reference a few over-arching wall colors in a few different places just so there’s some sort of flow and relation among the spaces, but not too much straight up cloning going on (thanks to varying other items like rugs, art, pillows, curtain fabrics, etc). … meanwhile the living room has a green geometric rug, colorful pillows, and softer tone-on-tone curtains with dark painted beams.
Comparing our color-coded floor plans above might make that pretty clear, but it’s even more evident when you actually look at room shots. Another place we tend to bring bright color into our current house would be art and painted furnishings.
Yet we have neutral tones in there to add balance, like the white cabinets, wood counter, and natural jute rug. It appears as though our love of cozy bedrooms has remained (especially with pretty chandeliers and breezy white curtains) but we’ve definitely turned up the dial with brighter pillows, a patterned headboard, and a bold rug in our current house.
There’s some soft avocado color on the walls, but the rest of the room is pretty neutral (white cabinets and shelves, a natural-toned light fixture, white appliances, cork floors, etc) since it’s such a small space and we didn’t want it to feel cramped. And then there are rooms that are a bit larger, like the hall bathroom, which got a plum undertone in the grey paint (it’s subtle but definitely noticeable in person) and some bright art along with a colorful window treatment and some teal knobs on the vanity. It’s nice to stop and examine these things occasionally because then we can look back on them (posts like this are essentially a time capsule for us, since pages like our House Tour are constantly being updated – so all the in-the-middle stuff gets bumped out).
