Do you have a whole-house color scheme?

[AmyRI]

A la Sue the Napkin?
Kidding, sort of...

Our next big project is having the 3 main rooms downstairs (living room, office, and dining room) repainted. I have no idea what to paint them, though, and I've been thinking about this for a long time. The 2 other rooms downstairs are the kitchen (apple green beadboard and trim, buttery yellow walls) and the bathroom (blue tile floor, white under chair rail, and blue above chair rail). Not exactly matching. It's making it hard for me to envision what to paint the other rooms without ending up with so many colors that it looks awful.

So, how much do you try to make colors flow from one room to another? Do you have a way to pick colors - choose a fabric to pull colors from, do similar shades of one color, or just use one color throughout when possible?

[Susie]

My house, and especially the downstairs, is a palette of colors that coordinate but don't match per se.

Here's a list with swatches: guinsyard.wordpress.com/products-colors-and-sources/

Honestly it just kind of happened one room at a time. I do have some fabric in more than one room that guides things. I have matching curtains in the LR & DR, and a couple of fabrics that repeat on table runners in the LR and FR, and chair seat covers in the DR. Mostly, though, I know what I like and I just end up picking similar things.

The yellow on that list, which I used on the guest room and office bedroom, is probably the most different and also the one I'm most likely to repaint in the foreseeable future.

[TBM]

We haven't in the past, but this house seems to want/need more continuity...more of a flow. We are trying to be thoughtful about choosing colors that relate to the other rooms, especially in the rooms that are open to the same hallways or to the courtyard.

[pitterwoo]

I like ALL THE COLORS...however my house has settled into a palette so that the same colors are repeated throughout. A different color may take center stage in each room, but the same general colors are used. It kind of happened naturally as I picked out a couple rugs and curtain fabrics. From there I just stuck with it.

[munkii]

Like Susie, we don't have a scheme, but everything coordinates (blues and greens). The one exception is the yellow family room that I'm too lazy to paint.

[boiler717]

My old house everything is different.

This house I'm trying to be more cohesive on the first floor since its an open floor plan. Every room has navy or aqua accents.

[DotAndBuzz]

I too love all the colors, and would end up with a rainbow house if left to my own devices. We had a lot of rooms to paint all at once when we moved in (hired guys to remove an epic amount of wallpaper, so 70% of the house was essentially a blank slate).

The best thing I did was hire a color consultant. I used one from my Benjamin Moore store, and she seriously pulled it all together for me, and helped me focus what I wanted. I was like "PURPLE! GREEN! YELLOW! OOOHH....how about burgundy? DARK BROWN!!!" She basically got me on track, and helped me do lots of color that still flowed cohesively, but didn't make my house look like a mardi gras party that my preschooler designed.

I brought shams from the bedrooms to be painted, and my dishes so she could know what would be in the room/what I liked, in general.

$75 well spent, imo. And some paint stores will credit part or all of the color consultant fee towards your final paint purchase (I think Sherwin Williams does this).

[salliekate]

I'm wanting to repaint our house, so thank you for this thread. Currently, our whole house is painted yellow. The previous owners did it, and we thought it was fine. Well, four years later, I HATE that yellow. I think I'm going to do the LR/DR (which share a wall and have to be the same color) Manchester Tan (BM), our kitchen is Georgian Green (BM) that we painted when we redid it. I think I'll do Manchester Tan in at least one of the bedrooms, maybe a gray or greige in the other, and then a blue-ish something in the master.

All that to say, I think it's nice when everything coordinates, but I also think coordination happens more often than not for most people without trying because they tend to like colors in the same family.

[demandypants]

I do one room at a time too, and I like the rooms to flow well together but not match. So far, I have a dark greige room, opening to a light green kitchen, and then off of the kitchen is the dark blue family room. However i pull the other colors in as accents. So there is some blue in my kitchen, green in the FR... it helps keep it cohesive without being boring. bedrooms are treated independently. Cause the pink my daughter chose matches nothing.

[auntie]

I have a center hall colonial. My first floor colors are themed. The foyer/hall is a pale chamois, the LR and DR which are off the foyer are the same sage green. The office and kitchen are a deep barn red. The fabrics are all from the same Waverly book- I have a plain red texture on the DR/LR windows, a check on DH's chair and the DR chairs, a floral on my chair, the toile and check on my office windows. I have a ticking stripe wallpaper on one wall that runs from the kitchen, through my office and to my LR that ties the rooms together.

I'm thinking of ditching the red and adding a sea glass color to freshen things this fall.

Upstairs the chamois continue into the hall and landing, but the bedrooms are independently decorated. DS has a pale silvery blue, the guest room and my room have ghastly wallpaper that needs to go.

[prazenjc]

my colors coordinate/work with other spaces/rooms to which they adjoin/flow with. i just keep these in mind when choosing colors. we have reused some colors from one room in another in the house, but they don't remotely flow or adjoin one another otherwise (i.e., basement is revere pewter and our master bathroom is, too).

[ktzmoh]

We've only painted about 50% of our house so far - but I repeated the color of my living room in the guest room and also plan on using it in the guest bath. I think that's kind of an anchor color and everything else is going to deviate from that color. The kids rooms are kind of off grid because they are the kids rooms and I want them to be fun spaces. I let my 5 year old pick his color (which I thought was nuts in the store, but really love now that it's up).

I would echo what someone said about consulting the people at the BM store. My guy Sayid is amazing. I've brought in art and fabrics and he has helped me to pick things that work for the particular room, but also work with what he knows we already have. He makes fantastic suggestions.

[mrs.jacinthe]

I've painted exactly two rooms in this house. Purple and a minty spa green.

I prefer for color to flow from room to room, but I don't want my whole house to be the same color (NO TAN). So I try to coordinate the paint color from one room to at least look decent against the paint color in whatever rooms are visible from that room. KWIM?

[Deleted]

Not really. I'm not good with color though, even though I have what I think is a lot of it. When I have a success, it's purely by accident. Our house has pretty closed off rooms though, no open concept here, so the color changes aren't quite jarring, I think.

[kermit]

I'm like Susie, colors are coordinated but not matching. Lots of blues and grays. I did paint the main floor hall bath a light pink (BM Proposal) and also used that same pink on the ceiling of the dining room that is next to it, so it sort of ties in. The office has greige walls with a pale yellow ceiling, so that brings in a different color without being too in your face about it.

[magdala]

Not intentionally. After we finished decorating, I realized that every room had shades of green, blue, and brown in it. This makes it easy to transfer items from room to room, we didn't try to make the whole house coordinate.

[McGavin]

Everything except DD1 and DD2's rooms is in the warm colour family. Lots of oranges, warm reds, burgundy, and dark woods.

[april37]

My main floor coordinates. All the colors are pulled from a huge picture we have hanging over our fire place. Our upstairs rooms don't coordinate but they don't clash either.

[heygrey]

because of the openness between our living room and kitchen we have to have a coordinating colour scheme. the walls are grey with white trim with red and navy accents. the kitchen pulls more red while the living room pulls more navy.

our bedroom is painted a mint green with white/red/navy accents.

eta: it's clearly a nautical colour scheme. that was on purpose. 

[pitterwoo]

Jun 27, 2013 8:42:25 GMT -5 DotAndBuzz said:

I too love all the colors, and would end up with a rainbow house if left to my own devices. We had a lot of rooms to paint all at once when we moved in (hired guys to remove an epic amount of wallpaper, so 70% of the house was essentially a blank slate).

The best thing I did was hire a color consultant. I used one from my Benjamin Moore store, and she seriously pulled it all together for me, and helped me focus what I wanted. I was like "PURPLE! GREEN! YELLOW! OOOHH....how about burgundy? DARK BROWN!!!" She basically got me on track, and helped me do lots of color that still flowed cohesively, but didn't make my house look like a mardi gras party that my preschooler designed.

I brought shams from the bedrooms to be painted, and my dishes so she could know what would be in the room/what I liked, in general.

$75 well spent, imo. And some paint stores will credit part or all of the color consultant fee towards your final paint purchase (I think Sherwin Williams does this).

I didn't know that the paint stores had color consultants.  That sounds really helpful...because otherwise this:

[sillygoosegirl]

Not really on purpose, but we bought a 5 gallon bucket of Tuscan Olive shortly after we moved in, so we have a lot of that to use up. And, well, we like it. I was surprised to discover after we got the family room painted that it was just about the exact same green as our couch, our bed sheets, and the curtains I have picked out for the living room (which is yellow). None of these were on purpose, we just like the color and keep choosing it... Without realizing the pattern until recenting. The previous owners were really into browns, beiges, and yellows, and we've left a lot of those... which go rather nicely with our green if I do say so myself (well, the ones we've chose to keep do anyway). The other colors I tend to gravitate toward are red and white. We've painted some white in halls and small places, but I want to get cherry woodwork throughout the house eventually and the family room has a wall of red brick, so we're purposefully avoiding red paint (DH thinks it would clash... And I suppose he's probably right).

[Deleted]

We have coordinating browns and greens throughout the entire house with different accents in each room so they all flow, but have a different feel.

[Deleted]

I have a lot of turquoise and orange throughout. And everything is beige.