This Fayetteville homeowner opted to layer browns in his guest bedroom, using toile fabric in the bedding, furnishings and draperies, and then matching it with a custom wall color. Photographed by Rett Peek and featured in our Color Issue, the room exudes the same understated elegance as this look from Carolina Herrera’s Resort 2010 Collection.
Welcome Mary Lawlor, color stylist at Kelly-Moore Paints! To complement our Color issue, now online, she’s here with her top tips for selecting paint color for your home. Mary tracks the paint industry’s color trends and develops both consumer and trade-friendly color tools for Kelly-Moore. She speaks to design and paint groups on color forecasts and provides insight on color trends and color style evolution. We’re happy she joined us–Check out what she had to say!
A successful color scheme is a scheme that is pleasant to live with and reflects the moods and personalities of the people living in it. Creating living areas that allow us to rest and relax are just as important as creating other places that invigorate or stimulate us. Light and color affect our senses. Bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens all serve different needs. A few tips can help you find a right palette for your home..
go to the paint store without any preconceived color ideas. Select a wide variety of color samples to consider from the store selector and take them to the room being painted.
their color will play a part in the color-making decision.
These bright furniture colors are grounded with Kelly-Moore’s HL4263-3 Hammered Pewter, a cool neutral color from the Arts & Crafts palette.
At this point you should see immediately any colors that will not work in your space and eliminate them
a surprise color might be just right for your space.
a color wheel is an invaluable tool. Use it to help find colors that work well with your existing elements. Most color wheels offer helpful hints for putting schemes together. Even if you are only using one paint color in your room, the colors of other items in the room will create a color scheme.
The neutrals in this room are a combination of calm and bold. Only the cushions and draperies add that all-important dash of color. Kelly-Moore’s Trim HL4241-1 Stocking White; Wall 1 HL4217-3 Limbert Leather; Wall 2 HL4279-3 British Khaki
A quiet workspace might need the tranquil feeling created by cooler colors like blues and greens. Gathering places might want to feel a little livelier. Warm colors like reds and oranges tend to add excitement to an environment. (Click here and here for inspiration.)
For an overall color, look for more neutralized colors. For example, if you have a desire for a yellow room, the perfect yellow might not be yellow at all, but a neutral with yellow undertones. (Click here for inspiration.)
Selecting a color slightly lighter than your first choice is suggested. (Click here for inspiration.)
color will look different in varying light sources. Color viewed in natural light during the day changes once a light is turned on. Old style “cool†fluorescent lights tend to wash out colors. Color in a room with “warm†incandescent light appears more natural. A more energy efficient choice is the newer compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). They are now available in a variety of color temperatures, with a 3500K being the most pleasing — not too cool or too warm and reveal colors very accurately.
it will enrich your space. It can also be changed relatively easily when you have a desire to explore a new area!
Remember when we asked you to send photos of a boring bathroom to us, something we could make-over with color?
Here it is, reader and Facebook fan Betsy Orr’s bland bathroom in Rogers, and now you can see the bath makeover online as well.
El Dorado-based interior designer Andrea Brooks (another Facebook fan!) stepped up to the color challenge. Her colorful suggestions:
1. Paint the walls Sherwin Williams Open Air, a tranquil light blue that would give the room a feeling similar to this:
2. Paint the cabinet a deep blue/green, an affordable way to update a basic vanity. Here’s the paint and an idea of the end result:
3. Andrea suggests adding roman shades in a striped fabric that pulls the blue and green together.
Which would look similar to this on the window above the bathtub:
4. Then she suggests adding a range of accessories that would tie together the colors: a fabric for the vanity seat, art for the wall next to the tub, trays and bowls for the counter area, and new knobs/pulls for the vanity. (Art by Beverly McLarty, Backwoods Art & Frame Gallery; Accessories from Murphy Long Design, both in El Dorado).
We love the idea of tranquil blue bathroom, spiced up with some colorful accents. You can read the full story online in our Color Issue.
A few more blue baths to inspire you:
(Photos courtesy of House Beautiful, Country Living and Domino)
If you’ve done some bath making-over yourself, let us know about it! Enter our contest and you may be in our pages and on our blog too. We’d love to see your place.
Interested in all things colorful? Check out our Color issue (now online with a rainbow of tips), and then hop on over to some of our favorite sites.
Check out Colour Lovers, a “resource that monitors and influences color trends, giving people who use color–whether for ad campaigns, product design, etc.–a place to see what’s going on in the world of color.” Have a gander and get lost in a sea of palettes and patterns.
Providing an in-depth look at color in the home, fashion, beauty and more, Sensational Color even delves into the messages and meanings of certain hues.
Decor by Color is the place to go if you want to play out your obsession with with a certain color or mix of colors. Click on any of the number of colors on the main page (pink+brown, turquoise, green), and you’ll be directed to a variety of home products available for purchase in that shade.
Repainting? Remodeling? Revamping your bedroom? That will likely involve slathering on new paint, and My Perfect Color is here to help you find the perfect hue with more than 100,00 color matches from more than 100 paint brands.
We’ve been talking home organization this week, with a great blog post yesterday from organizational expert and blogger extraordinaire Katie Buchanan of Little Rock Paper Scissors. She talks about organizing her own closet, so I thought I’d air some of my own dirty laundry and reveal a before and after organization project as well.
Here’s what my family room looked like when we moved to Fayetteville. Yes, decidedly un-glamorous. We had some organizing work to do.
Here’s my 5 Step Program:
1. Add built ins for corralling all that electronic mess, plus games, books and more
Yes, that really is the same space where the TV was on the table. See what built in storage can do? And yes, that is me, showing how easy the new space is to use :) And our little puppy Roxy. This was a few years back and Roxy is now too big for that dog bed. But the shelves still work great.
2. Choose multi-purpose furniture
We found a coffee table that could hold games, books and that slew of magazines that I always have around…occupational hazard. Same for the side tables, they have shelves below for more magazines (all my copies of At Home, of course).
3. Use bins and boxes
This one goes without saying…boxes and properly-used (not junk piled) bins are an organizer’s best friends. I marked the photo boxes with pictures showing which family member’s stuff was in each box. Which leads to the next point…
4. Get the family stuff out of the “save” pile and somewhere you can enjoy it
While I was rummaging through all those years of great pre-school art, hand prints, and such, I decided to put it somewhere I could see it. Since that cute little handprint now belongs to a 14 year old, it’s great to be able to look back daily and enjoy these.
5. Sit back and enjoy your hard work. Find a game in that well-organized bin and play it with the kids. Enjoy that puppy.
In the interest of full disclosure…no, my house is not this neat on a daily basis. A friend of mine at Ladies Home Journal liked the home organization concept and published this back in 2007. And my good friend, photographer Dan Piassick, took these great shots. Our house always looks lived in, my photography skills are no where near this good, and it did take months to find these items, have the shelves made, etc.
But it was worth it! We spend more time in that room than any other one in the house.
If you’d like more home org tips, check out our features this month on organizing a home office or organizing a closet.
Katie Buchanan of Little Rock Paper Scissors has 13+ years experience in fashion, retail and event management, so it’s no surprise her business (organization, event planning, style consultations, holiday gift wrapping and delivery, you name it!) is exploding! We love her chipper personality and are thrilled that she allowed us a view of her own closet clean-up. Aren’t the results fabulous?
Thanks, Katie! (When can you come over to our house?)
Although I happily spend my time in a profession that involves organizing other folks’ messes, I rarely make time to sort out my own junk properly! Do as I say, not as I do, if you will. But with 2010 brewing, I decided to “hire†myself to get my own disastrous closet in tip-top shape. After all, I had recently moved into my own house…ahem…eight months ago, and the shoes on my dining room table were making it difficult to serve a decent meal.
I have a philosophy when it comes to organizing the useful yet rarely-seen closet/pantry/attic spaces in a home: We all go to such lengths to make the obvious rooms in our homes look beautiful with well-chosen colors, fabrics, furniture and fixtures, yet when it comes to the closet we personally enter 85 times a day, we treat it like a trash heap. There is absolutely no reason that our private spaces shouldn’t be as lovely as the rest of the home while remaining functional. After all, YOU are using that trashy closet, and YOU deserve to look at an extra-pretty space as much as sweet Aunt Hilda who has tea in your decked-out living room once a year!
To begin, I decided to paint the inside of my closet the same shade of pink as my adjoining bedroom. (Because, fun, hot single girls can get away with that sort of thing.) While a paint job is not a necessary step in this process, it did get my lazy ball rolling.
Painting the closet not only made me love it more, it forced me to TAKE EVERYTHING OUT OF IT. Removing absolutely everything is the very best way to really get down and dirty and purge what you don’t need, hate, or, let’s face it, can never fit in again. I was resigned to only put back what I truly loved and needed, including my Mt. St. Mary high school uniform, but not including the dress I wore to Sigma Chi formal senior year in college. You see where I’m going with this…..prioritize wisely!
The one downside of removing everything is that, well, everything is removed. This made the task look daunting! But it also forced me to get myself into gear, unless I wanted to sleep in a hotel.
…much less walk anywhere in my house.
When it was time for the actual closet re-organization, I followed the guidelines that I use when re-vamping closets for my clients:
Check the denial at the door and be ruthlessly honest with yourself. The cost of letting clutter pile up in your life far outweighs what it might cost to replace a silly skirt you haven’t worn in 6 years.
Jeans, t-shirts, slacks, all of it. More often that not, if you can’t see it, you won’t use it.
Although plastic and wood hangers make a closet look great, they are far bulkier and do not grip clothing well (without ugly hanger marks on the shoulders).
Use extra drawer space for accessories.
Doing this will force seasonal rotation and purging.
Place containers in alternate closet or under beds. Do not store in attics that are not climate controlled!
The results…
![DSCN1413[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/hd_blog_post-370195.jpg "DSCN1413[1]")
Are you a reader of At Home’s travel section, On the Road?
This month we’ve traveled to Bentonville and Rogers for a weekend getaway combining the best of both worlds: historic downtowns and modern amenities (including a great hotel and lots of good shopping). You can read the full story online.
Not going anywhere for a while?
Sure, it’s ice storming outside and all of the At Home team is working from home today, but look on the bright side: working from the couch isn’t so bad! Here, our weekly compilation of Friday Favorites to keep you company at home on this cold winter’s day. Enjoy!
Diane Carroll says, “Seems our sister publication, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyle, has caught the color bug too. Fun to see the jump from a color swatch to a real life room.” Head on over to Atlanta’s blog for the full story.
Once this ice storm subsides, Mandy Keener could use this hammock for her backyard. Read more about it on the popular blog, Oh Joy!
Paulette Pearson recently discovered this enchanting mother-and-daughter design blog, Good Bones, Great Pieces. Check out their relaxing bath redo (and the one we featured here in At Home, if you’re interested)!
Recognize this apartment from the movie, Sex and the City? Laura LaRue sure did! She says, “So fun to look back at all these on-screen interiors…..love those blue walls in Carrie’s apartment!” Check it out at the Material Girls blog.
Kathy Condrey says of this post from Haven and Home, “I love all of this color! It is giving me some great ideas to redecorate my daughter Perry’s room.”
We can hardly believe the similarity between Monique Lhuiller’s ethereal yellow and gold frock and this Conway master bedroom, featured in our Color issue and photographed by Rett Peek.
And this sweet spring get-up from Moschino Cheap & Chic evokes exactly the same youthful playfulness befitting of this girl’s room, from the same Conway home.
Don’t forget to enter your home in our 2010 Arkansas’ Best Contest for a chance to be featured on the pages of At Home in Arkansas magazine!
Our COLOR issue is here–should be arriving in your mailbox (you do subscribe, right?) and on newsstand shortly. And it’s on the web for you right now too!
It’s packed with rooms in a variety of colors. What’s your favorite shade? Mine’s blue.
Which product designer Brad Beach used beautifully in his Fayetteville home. Brad is the senior product development director for Walmart’s Mainstays and Home Trends lines, so he knows more than a thing or two about how important color can be. To make the open rooms flow together, he used shades of blue mixed with accents of red and pink throughout his living spaces and dining area.
Love this great Brunschwig & Fils wallpaper–he’s a master at mixing prints and patterns, and his secret is keeping the color tones consistent.
In the bedrooms upstairs, he used a variety of shades of brown–oh so soothing, and a guest room any visiting mother would be happy to call home. To tour the bedrooms, visit the story online.
Have your own colorful room you’re extra proud of? Enter our contest and let us see it!
At Home in Arkansas offers you a look inside the state's most inspiring homes. The magazine features monthly advice from the experts to help you plan your next remodel or redesign, entertain at home, or find Arkansas's best kept secrets. It is your definitive guide to the state's finest homes and gardens, design professionals, fashion and entertaining essentials, and premier shops and showrooms.
