If you want to create good flow and cohesiveness in your home, a whole house color scheme is the way to go. It is not about having the same color throughout the house, but instead using colors throughout the house that coordinate with or complement each other. When you stand in one room and look out, the colors in the adjoining rooms you see should coordinate with the color of the room you are in.
I know…sounds easier said then done! We had tried in previous homes, but never fully pulled off a true whole house color scheme. Then Martha came to the rescue. The new Martha Stewart Living paint line at Home Depot is designed to help you coordinate your whole house. Each paint chip has a color key symbol in the upper right hand corner. For easy coordination, simply select colors for your home from the same color key. As long as the symbols match you can’t go wrong.
Still nervous? I was too. It seems like a big deal to choose every color for your home all at once. To ease in, just start somewhere…anywhere. We started with choosing the perfect color for the nursery. We moved into this house with a new (less than a month old) baby boy, whom in our old house never had a space other than a play pen. Naturally we wanted to welcome him to his new home with a great nursery just for him.
The PERFECT color jumped out at us when we looked at the Martha Stewart paint chips. It was this yummy teal called Plumage. What a great name too!!! I was head over heals the moment I laid eyes on it. Conveniently it was a near perfect match to an accent color I used in the fabric I designed for the room. The color key symbol for Plumage was a star.
I was sold on Plumage, but we weren’t quite ready to take the leap on choosing the rest of the colors for the house. We got the Plumage paint for the nursery and then grabbed up every other paint chip with a star on it. As soon as we brought the paint chips home we quickly realized we also loved all the other colors in the star collection. They looked great in every room. We effortlessly chose colors for all the other rooms. Within less than an hour we had developed a whole house color scheme…THANK YOU Martha! Here are the details for each of our colors we chose and the rooms they will be used in.
The only color here that deviates from the star color key symbol, is the Sunken Pool color we used in the Laundry Room. We actually selected that color before we developed the full scheme. It is personally one of my favorite colors, so I did not care if it was not designated as a match in Martha’s color key symbols. Sunken Pool has an asterisk symbol. We have found that it actually flows very nicely with our other star colors.
We are nearly done painting the whole house top to bottom and all the original colors we chose from those paint chips turned out perfect. The house just goes together, but it is not all matchy-matchy. We certainly stuck to the blue and green families, but that was our preference. Within that range the star color collection offered a lot of wonderful variation to keep things interesting, yet cohesive. (Lots of posts and pictures about how they all work together coming soon!)
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I like! So wish I stumbled upon your blog a year ago!
Love the approach. Do you have a whole house colour scheme in a light colour? We are looking for a clean, crisp, elegant, contemporary colour scheme, but don’t want to use dark colours.
Thanks
Great colors, thanks for sharing. How were you able to put your colors together like that and then post them?
Judy, Thank you. I created the graphic with photoshop by matching the paint swatch colors from the retailers website.
How would you go about doing a whole house color scheme if you didnt want to use MS paint colors?
I read the article on 7 steps to a color scheme, but my house does not have properly chosen undertones.
What are your suggestions to get on track?
Jinger, I assume you mean you have a mix of undertones in your home. Then I would start with the most noticeable undertone. It might be the undertone of a wood floor running throughout the home or maybe the undertone of your kitchen cabinets. Ignore the undertone of tile in a small bathroom or less noticeable area.
Hi Jackie, I absolutely love your color choices and copied them when i moved into our current home in 2012. We are now moving and buying another home but the cabinetry throughout the house has red cherry cabinets. Do you think the same color scheme would work?
Susete,
It should. With your teal shades, I would tend more to the greenish teals to complement the red undertone. But you should be safe with the blues too. We actually have a four poster bed with a strong red undertone in our dark blue guest bedroom and it looks great. Best of luck with your move.