Choosing a color palette for the different rooms in your home is never easy, with so many wonderful options to select between these days. However, if you’d like some guidance in the matter, it pays to consider the idea of color therapy.
Rather than purely thinking about which shades you like to look at, you might also factor in how different hues can make you and your fellow housemates feel. Read on for the lowdown on this topic that you can remember as you choose colors for decorating or renovating rooms.
What is Color Therapy?
Color therapy, also known as chromotherapy, is a type of healing and design choice that relates to the idea that different hues affect how we feel. When we look at various shades, it’s believed we absorb different energies, with each color contributing to our mood in varying ways. Some people see each color as having a different frequency or vibration that affects the mind and body.
Our emotional state can mean we’re attracted to or repelled by different shades at different times or that some colors will help us to feel better, while some will make us feel worse, depending on where we’re at mentally and emotionally. Interior designers, architects, product manufacturers, and others have been using the effect of color in their design choices for centuries.
Some Common Color Meanings and Benefits
While colors are certainly subjective, there are some general ideas around each of the key hues that many people agree on. For example, yellow is regularly associated with positivity, happiness, joy, and vitality. As a result, it suits being used in a child’s bedroom, a kitchen, or a laid-back sitting room.
Pink is a color that many see as relating to love and romance, as well as calmness. It can be a good choice for the primary bedroom or bathroom. On the other hand, red has connotations of passion, energy, confidence, aggressiveness, fire, and stimulation. It’s likely to be too much in a bedroom unless you use it in subtle ways, but it can be well-suited for a gym, where you want to rev yourself up, or in the kitchen, where you bring the ‘heat.’
Blue is a shade long associated with focus, serenity, openness, deep thought, and coldness. You may want to keep it out of dining rooms and bedrooms as it may not be as welcoming as you’d like there, but it can work nicely in a home office or bathroom. Green is seen as a calming, tranquil, prosperous, and refreshing color that can encourage health and efficiency. It all depends on the type of green you choose, though. Brighter greens will provide more of a visual boost and reset, while softer, natural shades are more relaxing as they evoke a sense of nature.
Orange is said to line up with energy, ambition, and socialization, while purple aligns with mystery, creativity, wisdom, luxury, and sleepiness. Brown brings stability, reliability, strength, security, resilience, and groundedness to mind. Black is more unapproachable and promotes feelings of sophistication, elegance, power, sadness, anger, or intelligence. White is considered innocent, pure, clean, stark, expansive, clarifying, balancing, and calming.
Tips for Choosing Colors
Apart from understanding how the different colors can make us feel, it’s wise to think about things such as the mood and subliminal temperature you want to encourage in a room when choosing hues to decorate it with. For instance, cool tones such as blues and greens are best for areas of the house you want to feel colder and more refreshing, while warm tones like red, orange, and yellow work best in colder rooms of the home that you want to warm up.
Also, think specifically about how you want to feel in each space in your abode. For instance, are you looking to get a snug sensation or to make a part of your home feel open and airy? You might choose warmer shades such as some black, red, orange, and brown for a den that you want to snuggle up in. You could add fixtures and fittings like modern ceiling fan with lights or chandeliers in darker shades such as a solemn wood or elegant black, and add pops of color with throw pillows and area rugs.
Plus, consider how much natural and created light you have in each property area. The way we perceive color is affected by the light in a space and how the two interact, so you can control feel partly with lighting choices. You can also use a bold color as a focal point in different zones if you want to draw attention to different features. Alternatively, think about color therapy when you want to conceal things you don’t love so much – by making colors blend together, there’s less visual pull.
Color tends to have much more impact on rooms than we might expect and thus should be seriously considered anytime we build or renovate a property.