Choosing a Color Palette: A Designer’s Tips

One of the easiest ways to change a space is by painting the walls. It’s amazing to see the difference a coat of paint makes! Yet a lot of people don’t know where to start when choosing a color palette—there are so many options it’s easy to feel lost. As a designer, I wanted to share some of the tips that helped me transform my home.

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Our house, in a historic district close to Chicago, was built in 1892. I’ve loved the challenge of renovating such an old home, trying to find the balance between respecting the original character of the home while bringing it into the XXI century. If you’d like to read more about that process, there’s a post here on the blog about that. Updating the home’s color palette was one of the most drastic changes we’ve made! Even as a designer—or perhaps even because of it—it was very challenging choosing a color palette, but I’m very pleased with the result.

Tip #1: Choose the purpose of each space

We all know that each color transmits a sensation. For this reason, even before considering colors for a space, it’s important to determine that space’s purpose. Do you want your dining room to be vibrant or calming? Should your office be more formal or creative? When you’re in your bedroom, do you want it to give you a sense of amplitude or would you rather have it be cozy? All of these considerations will affect your color selection.

I recommend going into each space of your home and thinking about what its current color tells you, as well as what you would like a new color to do. After doing this for each room, you’ll have a master plan for your home that will help you in choosing a color palette that works for you.

Tip #2: Pay special attention to the light

One really important tip is the need to re-evaluate the light in each space. When choosing a color palette, the lighting will determine how that color will actually read. This is a great opportunity to rethink not only the color choices themselves, but also if the kind of lighting you currently have contributes or not to the objectives you’ve determined through the exercise in tip #1.

Each light bulb has a “temperature” that goes from warm (yellow, softer light) to cold (neutral, bordering blue, sharper light). Here’s a deeper dive into this concept. There’s no point in choosing a stunning color that changes completely in the space it was intended for. To have an idea of how colors change with different temperature lighting, here’s what I recommend:

• At a home improvement store, choose a color sample/chip
• Take the paint chip and walk a few aisles over into the lighting section
• Usually, the light bulb aisle has a lit-up demo of the available bulb temperatures. Hold the paint chip up to each one to have a better understanding of how the color changed depending on the light.

This may seem like a silly exercise, but it’s an easy and fool-proof way to help you choose both the right color and the right light.

Tip #3: Test, but test smart

I don’t have to tell you how important it is to test a paint sample at home. However, it’s important to test it in a way that will give you a true sense of what the color will look like there.

Our natural inclination is to paint a small sample on one of the walls and see how we feel. That’s where this tip comes in: to have a better idea about how natural light + indoor light + the architecture of the space will affect the perception of the color, test the sample on more than one wall. If possible, test it on all the walls. That way, it will be really clear how the color changes on walls that are against the natural light, the ones with most shade, and how the color reads differently throughout the day.

Additionally, there are lots of other factors that will affect how you perceive the color, such as the color and texture of the flooring, furniture, window dressings, etc.

Tip #4: Use colors to expand or contract a space

When choosing a color palette, you’re not only changing the mood of each space, you’re also resetting the perception of your space as a whole. Let’s say, for example, that your house flows directly between the living room and dining room (no walls or doors separate those spaces). If you paint both of them the same color, the space will look much bigger. If, on the other hand, you want to create a clear separation between the two, opt for different colors. This will also make each space look smaller and cozier.

In my home, as an example, the entryway is pretty tiny, and from there you go into the parlor. To make the entryway feel bigger, be painted it the same color as the parlor, that way the eye moves between the two spaces and reads them as a continuous room. Another example is our living room. It’s a fairly good sized room, with 10 foot ceilings and three huge bay windows. When we moved, the living room blood red (I know. ooph). We painted it a light, cool blue gray (Sherwin Williams Olympus White) and that made the space so much more modern and airy!

I’ve documented all of our renovation adventures on Instagram, by the way!

Tip #5: Choose the intensity of each color

Let’s say you tested a color and you liked it, but you wish it were a little less intense. Home improvement stores mix colors for you on the spot, so you can ask for them to mix only a certain percentage of the color into the while base. For example, you can ask for 25, 50, or 75% intensity. That can often be better and quicker than testing the colors directly above or below it on the color sheet.

Tip #6: Assess your palette as a whole

Before deciding on a color, it’s incredibly important to look at it in context—this is true regardless of whether you’re painting your whole house or a single room. Take a paint chip of each color and take a look at the color story that comes together. Is there one color that maybe looks off? Do the colors that will be side by side make sense together? It’s important to take a look at the whole, because that’s how you’ll experience them in the day to day.

I’m not saying that all the colors should match perfectly, by the way—far from it! But each color contributes to the palette as a whole, and should be chosen intentionally within that context.

Are these tips helpful? What other tips would you recommend for choosing a color palette? Let me know in the comments!

Stay curious,

Nati