What I Have Realized When Choosing Colors For Walls

Before we moved into the house we had been living in an apartment for years with carpet and white walls; the style (or lack of style) you will find in so many apartment complexes in this country. Extremely hungry for color, patterns, contrast, I was beyond excited to pick shades and get something more visually interesting up on the walls. I had a pretty good idea of the colors I wanted: I have always wanted a space with light yellow / soft beige walls simply because it feels so much brighter and more cheerful than many other muted tones.

Blue walls was another concept I really wanted to fit in the scheme in some way and I was particularly inspired by this design.

We painted one of the bedrooms a rather dark shade of blue (but not dark, dark blue, more like middle blue on the paint swatch) and even though it looks pretty great looking at it abstractly, it does make the room feel quite dark and cold.

The dining room on the other hand we painted a much lighter shade and this one doesn't feel nearly as forceful.

This difference between the two blue shades and how you perceive the rooms respectively really has gotten me to thinking of choosing paint colors for a space and I have come to the conclusion that there really are just two options: very light shades or very dark shades. For the most part, anything in the middle spectrum feels just too much, too bold, not refined, not subtle.

So many people swears by white. They love how it enables you to design around it with bright colors or create very calming and relaxing spaces without too much interference. And while I love some spaces that are primarily white, I can't help but to think it's kind of boring.

On the other hand, I have really gotten to appreciate light shades. For example, we painted one of the bedrooms a very very light pink shade called cotton candy.

If anything, I love this shade more and more each day. It's impossible to get tired of, it's soft and interesting and it really highlights wooden accents. Plus it looks different in various lights and it goes from being just light pink, to almost purple, to whitish with a tint.

Here is what I mean with how you can't go wrong with light shades:

from apartmenttherapy

And here is what I mean that the other option is to go the very dark route:

from misswallflower

from littlegreennotebook.com

from markdsikes.com

So conclusion: very light shades or very dark shades tend to work well in my mind. And even though you certainly can find gorgeous spaces that fall somewhere in-between on the color spectrum, it's definitely not as common, and it's much more difficult to pull off and keep it looking tasteful.

Note: any pictures that don't have sources come from my inspiration folder on my computer: in other words, I have no idea where they're from! So I apologize for not sourcing everything properly, I would if I only knew their source.