Bedroom Color Schemes And Bedroom Paint Colors:
Five Bedroom Color Ideas To Set The Scene.
Bedroom color schemes, or even just bedroom wall colors, can completely change the look & feel of a bedroom. Here are popular bedroom colors to create a
Check out how one bedroom design changes with each set of bedroom color ideas - change the colors and you have a new bedroom! (More bedroom decorating colors here, and great color combinations here!)
Bedroom Color Schemes 1:
A Classic, 'Desaturated' Look
Neutral bedroom colors are considered to be among the best colors for a bedroom, but there's currently an interesting trend towards bedroom colors that hover between 'real' color and neutral non-color.
You have to treat these almost-neutrals as colors (because they interact with other colors), but at the same time they're much, much more subtle than saturate colors.
Here's one of my favorite bedroom wall color combinations. It successfully plays off warm gray & cool, dusky lavender/plum:
You can keep this elegant, soothing bedroom bedrom paint color palette fresh and interesting by using
- a lot of texture, e.g.
◊ the bleached, weather-beaten wooden headboard
◊ a few choice, highly textured textiles, or
◊ pleated-leather accessories - a fair amount of clean white, milky white or antique-white highlights, as in
◊ crisp white bedlinen
◊ white paintwork/trims, e.g. the white stripe beneath the coving
◊ white window blinds - a few injections of 'real' color, e.g.
◊ the red cushion on the armchair
◊ a few choice laquerware accessories
◊ flowering plants (e.g. amaryllis, roses, poinsettia when in season) - some really deep, dark color accents, e.g.
◊ the deep purple pillows on the bed
◊ the upholstery fabric of the chair - this deep, inky version of purple actually works as a "soft black".
Bedroom Color Schemes 2:
Victorian Bedroom Color Ideas
Victoriana have been moving more into the spotlight recently, with lots of Victorian living room & bedroom paint colors as well as Victorian wall & floor tiles available.
Victorian bedroom color schemes often build on a blue-brown color base (the brown having a tendency towards the mousy or yellowish). The blue/brown foundation is then topped with a few deep, glowing colors like teal, 'burnt' vermilion and mustardy yellows.
Original Victorian interiors can feel heavy, dark and gloomy, but contemporary bedroom color schemes
don't need to go there! To brighten things up, just use lighter colors (like the pale
blue wall color behind the bed), and plenty of fresh white and light gray.
(By the way, the "bed head" consists of scaled-up, mounted photographs of original Victorian wall tiles from a London fireplace.)
Popular bedroom colors that work well for Victorian-style interiors:
- buff browns
- intense, 'jewel' blues (particularly deep turquoise & lapis lazuli
- pale, chalky blues
- vegetable & leafy greens
- olive green
- warm terracotta & deep cotto reds
- tomato red
- pale salmon pink
- mustard & sunflower yellows
- creamy whites
- charcoal
Bedroom Color Schemes 3:
Nautical Bedroom Color Ideas
Let's take the blue-brown bedroom color ideas from #2 and turn them into a fresh, dapper, Shipshape-and-Bristol-fashion color palette. (Translation for non-Brits: this means "neat, clean & in proper good order")
The standard interpretation of 'nautical' bedroom decor is based on a white,
blue and red color palette, accessorized with a few natural wood hues.
The room above is more suggestive of the unpainted wooden interiors of antique seagoing ships, but it uses 'nautical' colors for all painted & textile surfaces - with one exception: the green armchair.
The color green often enters nautical bedroom color schemes by way of plants, and it provides a welcome hint of 'natural' color, especially in an all-white environment.
Stripes are great for accent walls and accessories: in the picture, stripes are used for the bedspread, wall, and seat cushion. The bedhead is made of a low wattle screen to add texture to the room.
Nautical palettes are among the most popular bedroom colors, and if you stick to the following
rules you can't go wrong:
- Use original navy blue plus lighter versions of this hue, i.e. navy blue mixed with white. (Royal blue and cobalt blue don't look quite right for this style - and I'd definitely steer clear of any blue with a purply bias!)
- Use primary red, or a less bright version of this color. Slightly bluish reds are fine as well, as well as washed-out, grayed pinks - but don't go anywhere near yellowish reds (e.g. tomato or brick).
- If white, navy and primary red are your main bedroom paint colors, you could enliven your nautical palette with a few accessories in 'flag colors' (sunny yellow, light sky blue, black, primary green).
Bedroom Color Schemes 4:
"Seventies" Paint Colors For The Bedroom
Have you noticed? The Seventies are, um, kind of back. (I know. The decade that taste forgot. I was a teenager when our lives got covered in orange-green-brown ... I saw it happen ... yes, I got covered, too ... sigh :-)
However, there are many ways to salvage the best of this style. One of them is to use 'pop' colors selectively and surround them with plenty of white, as I've done here:
The classiest original Seventies interiors contained loads of white.
And if, by chance, you happen to have a Panton, Wegner or Jacobsen chair
somewhere around the house, it would probably fit in beautifully with your bedroom paint colors!
As an alternative to white, try a selection of very neutral grays (i.e. grays
that are made up of clean white and black, with no color admixtures), or grays with a
greenish or bluish bias.
For yet another option, try combining these Seventies colors:
- orange
- acidic green
- turquoise
- dark brown wood and
- dark gray ...
... to create some seriously retro bedroom color schemes.
Bedroom Color Schemes 5:
Romantic Summer Pastels
To get here from the Seventies color scheme (above, #4), all you need to do is repaint the wall & door and change the armchair cover and a few pillowcases. Voilà, you're in a different universe!
Pastels are very popular bedroom colors - they are easy on the eye, soothing
and refreshing at the same time.
The secret here is to limit the palette to two main colors and use any other hues very sparingly. Here, the main players are aqua and pale pink, supported by a bit of yellowish green and greenish yellow.
Note how, against a white background, you don't need particularly bright or dark colors to create an impact. The reason is that when we look at an expanse of white, our pupils contract and make any color appear darker than it actually is.
Some bedroom color ideas for your headboard:
- Paper a wall section behind the bed with the Most Gorgeous Wallpaper you can afford. Varnish or cover with perspex for protection, and match your bedroom wall colors and bedding to this wallpaper.
- Cut a flower painting out from a large poster and découpage it onto painted plyboard.
- Have a gifted person paint some supersize roses or peonies ('painting-by-numbers'-style) onto board, cut along the outline and mount as a headboard (example illustrated above).
- Bedspreads are another great source of bedroom color schemes: Make your bedspread the star of the show and choose your bedroom paint colors sparingly in matching hues.
- More bedroom color schemes: Six-plus-seven palettes of bedroom decorating colors, from soothing to sexy via masculine and yummy ;-)
- Find the right bedroom wall colors with ease.
- Create bedroom color schemes that always work, by studying Interior Design Colors 101 (free one-page course!)
- Learn to come up with bedroom color ideas by using a variety of inspiration.
- Understand how to get your paint colors right.
- Use the findings of color psychology to analyze your bedroom color ideas.
- Would neutral color palettes work as paint colors for the bedroom? Find out!
- Check out this overview of creating room color schemes, and find new ways to generate bedroom color schemes!
- Neutral Color Schemes - The
Book:
Learn about using neutral color palettes in your bedroom (and everywhere else in the house, too!) Understand what makes neutral color schemes look their best, and what happens when you inject 'real' color into neutral color palettes. It's FREE!!
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