How to Use Color Psychology to Refresh Your Home Year-Round
Your interior design intuition may have lost its spark in the last few months. You’re not sure why, but suddenly the shades that once brought you calmness and joy make the environment incomplete.
Color psychology plays a massive role in how homeowners feel about their space, and you can use it to your advantage. Even though people associate certain colors and patterns with specific times of year, there are ways to bank on the satisfaction of design and psychology all the time. Here’s how.
Color Psychology’s Relationship With Interior Design
Color psychology is a field of research studying how humans react to color. It dives into emotional and behavioral responses. Researchers have found something as trivial as color can influence purchasing decisions due to their temper’s shortness. If you can fix your home to evoke a happy, productive mood, why wouldn’t you?
This is what makes color psychology’s relationship with interior design so interesting. A blue bedroom next to a red dining area evokes an entirely different atmosphere, changing how you act or feel in each space.
The fashion industry has seen a spike in interest in color analysis, which shows what seasonal palette fits best with your skin tone. The results guide you on what colors accentuate your features and provide shadows or highlights in the most flattering places.
Color psychology in interior design has a similar impact, illuminating the best parts of the home in their perfect colors.
Psychological research proves that every color connotes certain feelings. Therefore, you can take what you understand about your household and family’s tendencies and design the space to mitigate negativity, encourage togetherness and refine the aesthetic at the same time.
What Each Color Means for Interior Design
Psychologists have long studied color theory and its impact on the brain. While results vary slightly from report to report, each color is overwhelmingly consistent from one source to the next.
It’s important to note that your personality may impact how you feel about a certain color, but here’s what experts have concluded:
Red: Love and passion
Green: Growth and freshness
Purple: Nobility and glamor
Blue: Pensiveness and peace
Orange: Tenderness and warmth
White: Truth and emotionlessness
Black: Coldness and mystery
Pink: Softness and reservedness
Yellow: Happiness and caution
As you can see, some choices can have positive and negative side effects simultaneously, while others are more commonly associated with purely good or bad emotions.
How to Use Color Psychology to Refresh Your Home All Year
So, do these findings mean you should paint your entire house yellow for eternal happiness or get rid of anything red for fear of anger? It’s a more nuanced discussion than that. Discover how to tastefully incorporate color psychology into your home’s appearance to get the best of both worlds.
Seasonal Color Swaps
Colors are associated with more than emotions. They have festive or seasonal associations, which have subconscious color pairings on their own.
Autumn is warm and comforting, so adding rich greenery and candles adds accents to wood furniture.
Winter is bright and crisp, so you can evoke those feelings by finding throw pillows with light, pearl tassels and cream fur blankets.
Spring is about daylight and early blossoms, so play with floral and gingham patterns on valences and open up the sheer curtains.
Summer is about being in nature, so add lush berry tones to evoke seasonal fruit and natural textures like bamboo to feel closer to the outdoors.
Outdoor Edits
You can also use these strategies outside. Your home’s curb appeal has a significant impact on how neighbors and future homebuyers view your property — it can even boost its resale value for future sales.
Start by installing colorful furniture or staining the railings and decks to make it look brand-new. When all else fails to deliver pizazz, a fresh coat of paint does wonders for the front door.
Textures and Layers
A quilted textile wall hanging gives a different vibe than a macrame piece. This is because the way the colors appear to feel is important, too. Royal purple velvet feels like it should exist on a snow day next to a crackling fire, whereas a minimalistic glass mirror opens the room to more summer light.
These layers deepen the room’s experience and highlight the color in it.
How to Meld Color Psychology With Existing Decor
These suggestions will stop you from spending tons of money on new decorations and renovations. Work with what you have with these techniques.
Acknowledge Dominant Colors
If your home is already decked in color, complementary accents can change a room’s tone just as much as picking a completely new dominant palette. A predominantly forest-green room with black furniture feels different if adding lampshades with pink roses and soft white bulbs.
Use Accents for Definition
Many home interiors have neutral bases, such as white, gray or beige walls. It’s prime time to introduce pastels, like soft blues, pinks, yellows or greens. They’re subtle yet luxurious, delivering a more tangible emotion alongside more muted achromatic colors.
Display Artwork
There’s no need to undergo a massive renovation when art can add tons of character to a neutral room. Art is a fascinating way to draw the eye to pops of color instead of overwhelming the individual with four walls of it.
You and your guests will also associate the colors of the art with the styles, which creates a more interesting interior design narrative for the household.
For example, pastel impressions paintings in several white bedrooms can still make you contemplative, and high-contrast pop art with splashes of cherry red can make you feel impassioned and creative.
Light the Area
Lighting impacts everything, no matter what colors are in the space. Adding a warm tone to a blue space or a cool tone to a yellow room changes the game without needing to repaint or change cushion covers.
You can also see how incorporating more natural light alters a room’s setting.
Coloring Outside the Lines
The mind works in mysterious ways, but you’ll feel the difference in your home’s interior almost immediately after putting up new wallpaper or paint. Color fills you with specific emotions because of how it reacts with the brain.
Whether you want to embrace more peace or productivity in the home, using psychology as a reference point can help create a beautifully cohesive household while designing new habits.
Evelyn Long is the Editor-in-Chief of Renovated Magazine, where she writes on interior design and home organization content. She is passionate about making home styling easier for all homeowners and renters by writing about home interior trends. Subscribe to renovated.com/subscribe for more posts by Evelyn!
