Building a Simple Interior Color Palette Without Using Too Many Shades

If you’ve ever started a mood board just for color and it ends up being cluttered, you may have fallen into this trap: collecting too many color shades and then wondering how to make them all work together.

Start by taking a closer look at all the colors in the room. It’s easy to forget that the walls and larger pieces of furniture count here, even when they’re neutral colors. Take into consideration any floors, wall color, rugs, furniture, textiles, accents, etc. Colors don’t have to match perfectly; in fact, if you have a controlled color scheme with just a few colors, those colors may be repeated in different shades to distinguish them.

Before introducing a new color into a room, you first need to have a good sense of what’s already in there. Consider those fixed colors as part of your palette.

Next, take a look at the undertones of the colors. If you have two whites, beiges, grays, taupes, or wood tones, how do they compare? When placed side by side, you may find that one looks grayish or yellowish, the other pinkish or greenish; one will look warmer, the other will look cooler. To see this for yourself, gather some paint chips or photos of all the major colors in a room: the wall color, a sample of the flooring, fabric sample or sofa color, curtains, wood finish, and view them all together. It may look completely different than what you had assumed.

For instance, if a room is already warm beige with muted brown accents and soft cream, and you layer a bright blue, a strong red, and cool grays on top of that, it’s going to feel cluttered. Instead, a room can have contrast and interest from the value (like a lighter wall color against darker furniture), or through using one muted color of contrast (like a deep, muted green pillow on a warm, neutral sofa).

Look for ways to contrast textures and surfaces, which is another way to create distinction between different colors. You might have matte painted walls, a woven fabric sofa, shiny tile floor, and wooden furniture. These all add their own personality to a room, which helps to distinguish colors when they’re in the same family.

When viewing inspiration for the colors, don’t be tempted to collect all the colors that you see in multiple images. For instance, you may see an image with a dusty pink, a dark blue, two shades of wood, and a terracotta accent. If you collect them all, it’ll become difficult to sort out on your mood board. Instead, try to focus on what the idea of the image is (maybe it’s the contrast that you love, the warm woods and neutrals, etc.) and see if some images are contradicting each other. You may need to edit those out so that your mood board makes sense.

Finally, take your paint chips or color samples back to the space that you’re planning to paint and view them there. View them during the day as well as at night under artificial lighting, as undertones change under different lighting conditions.