Does color matter? Of course you know that how you decorate your home affects how you feel in it. But you may not realize how much power your color choices have. It’s been well established that colors affect the human experience. This means that no matter how much you like a color, it may be wrong for a room, or a color you think of as ugly might be the perfect one to set the mood you want. Let’s look at colors and how they work to make our homes homey.
Warm and Cool Colors
Colors are generally grouped into Warm and Cool groups, because the two groups create different reactions within humans. Warm colors include variations of red, orange, yellow. Cool colors include variations of blue, green, and violet.
Using warm colors can cause various kinds of excitement. They can make you feel energized, awake, hungry, or even agitated. This can be great in kitchens, offices, home gyms, or other places where productivity or activity is good.
Cool colors are known to be calming, soothing, and reassuring. Colors in this range promote feelings of health, quality sleep, and comfort. These can be great choices for spaces where you want people to relax and stay a while.
You’re Already Being Affected by Color
What you may not have considered is that without making conscious color choices, you will still be influenced by the colors in your home. Colors have power, and they may be creating something other than the emotions you’d hoped to have at home.
Does Color Matter When Buying or Selling a Home?
Homes you see when shopping for new property will almost always be painted in beige, white, and eggshell colors. That’s because light colors make spaces look bigger, and the beige and eggshell colors invoke a feeling of reliability or agelessness. Humans tend to think of things in this color range as enduring and dependable, but flexible. That’s exactly how home sellers want you to see their home, and it might be how you want homebuyers to see yours.
Before selling, you’ll certainly want to get rid of any colors that are strong or bold. You’ll want prospective buyers to see your home as flexible and able to adapt to their style. This is hard or impossible to accomplish with colors that raise your heart rate dramatically (bright orange) or make you feel heavy and sleepy (navy blue).
Tips for Choosing Colors
Here are some simple tips that can help you arrive at the right colors for your home:
- Decide how you want each room to make you feel or what sort of activities it’ll be used for
- Do a little research on what colors might match your intended uses
- Bring home some color chips from the paint store to help you decide
- Remember that colors on paint chips will look brighter and bolder once they get on a large area, so go a little less wild than you might otherwise