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Interior designer Emily Henderson is a genius when it comes to styling. Her new book, Styled, comes out today and is filled with more than 1,000 tips for making rooms look beautiful. Here, she shares three surprising pointers you can try right now…
Says Emily:
1. If you love color, don’t paint your walls. It sounds counterintuitive, but here’s why: If you are someone who loves color, then you are probably someone who tends to buy a lot of colorful accessories, rugs, textiles, even furniture. So if your walls are also painted a color, then your room could look like a crazy person lives there. Your eye has no space to rest. I’ve been a victim of this myself now twice.
Here’s what you do: Choose between your walls being colorful and your decor being more neutral (with some pops), or your walls being more neutral and your decor being colorful. A room with a blue wall, a hot pink sofa and big pops of yellow everywhere may look good in a magazine, but in person it will look like visual chaos and you will get sick of it really quickly.
These teal walls represent the ‘crazy walls, neutral stuff’ scenario.
2. Find the color you love putting on your body the most. It’s the old fashion-to-home story and it works. We wear the color that is most flattering to our complexion, so why not design your home with some of those colors as well? Colors go in and out of trend, sure, and you don’t want to paint your walls a neon pink-and-yellow colorblock, but most of us have general tones that we like to be in and around. What have you consistently worn over the years? What are you most comfortable in? Start your color palette there. For me, it’s indigos, whites, gray-toned blues and hits of pink, as you can see in the photo above.
3. Every room should have a mix of warm and cool colors. A room with only cool tones (blues, greens, grays, whites, blacks) can look stark and cold, while a room with only warm tones (browns, reds, yellows, oranges, beiges) can look heavy and dated. Remember that woods, gold and brass count as warm, and silver counts as cool. Each room should have a balance to look modern and fresh, yet cozy and inviting.
Smart, right? Which colors do you love and use most? Find Emily’s amazing book here, if you’d like to read more. Congratulations, Emily!
P.S. Emily’s tips on hanging art and a bright, colorful home.
(Photos by David Tsay. First living room and bedroom designed by Emily Henderson. Blue room designed by Taylor Jacobson. The photo with the camel is by design firm Project M Plus.)
