It gets easier as soon as you resist the urge to choose too many colors at once. A room doesn’t have to have five bold colors, plus three wood tones plus patterned textiles plus metal with sheen plus all the other accent objects in one room. When starting off on a single room plan, a smaller palette will give you more control and make it easier for all the walls and furniture and fabrics and lights and other decorative objects to feel related.
Start with the room itself and not with a color you saw somewhere else. Look at everything in the room that can’t easily be replaced, like the flooring, the doors, the window casings, the sofa, the storage cabinet, wall tiles or a large area rug. They can all be warm or cool, light or dark, shiny or matte, patterned or plain. When these get ignored, a new palette can look odd even when every color looks nice by itself. A pale wood floor, gray sofa, red-brown cabinet, and bright wall are all different colors, and the room may have no idea where to go without a color plan that ties all of this together.
When starting out, it’s helpful to divide up the simple palette into three parts: neutral, supporting color, accent color. Neutral usually takes up the most visible space in the room: it is most likely to be found in the walls, larger furniture items, drapes or carpets. Supporting color is used in smaller amounts than neutral, and is usually a color found in a chair, bedding set, throw pillows, pictures or small furniture pieces. Accent is used sparingly, and is most likely to be found in decor, lighting, vases, framed art prints or small repeated objects. By using just three different groups like this, you won’t end up with the color palette feeling one-note flat, and you won’t fill it with more color than necessary and make the room feel crowded.
Before adding the accent color, it helps to check the room to see if it works with the neutral color you’re considering, and to consider what kind of lighting the room will have at different times of day. Some neutrals appear tranquil in a photo, but turn cold next to a real room window, or very dark in a room with limited natural light. Take some room photos during the day and night. Get the neutral color samples or virtual color samples and place them in the actual room next to the existing floor, furniture and textiles. You’re not trying to get it perfect immediately, you’re just trying to figure out what doesn’t work in this room. You want to know what colors will fight the room, what colors won’t make it work for you.
You should also think about what you’re going to use in the room, and not just the colors you’re choosing. Cream colored soft fabric, shiny white tile, and painted white shelves are all white, but they will look and feel very different in one room. Remember that color is just a part of the whole room design, you need to think about texture, finish and reflectivity of colors. If there are many different colors, textures or surfaces in the room, like wood grain, linen, patterned rugs and unglazed pottery, you may have to tone down the color of your new color palette. If your current room looks a little bland and plain you may need to add a little more interest to the room with a stronger accent color, a warmer color swatch, or by changing the existing color of something in the room.
Before going out to buy any new materials or furniture, I recommend making a small sample board with a neutral swatch, a supporting color swatch, an accent color swatch, some material samples, plus maybe one other piece of furniture that you already own and plan to put in the room. Don’t worry about whether it will work perfectly yet, just try to take a look at what you have. You don’t need anything perfect, you just need to know which color isn’t working in your color combination. You can always replace it.
This is the point where we usually end up with an interesting, but slightly off color palette in the room because you added a new color to the board that was so nice, you had to add it to your color plan. Even if it didn’t work, it had to be used on just one thing in the room. A simple color palette can be creative if you’re smart. If the new colors make the room easier to understand as a room, then the neutral base, supporting color, accent color and materials will all feel right in one room together. You can always tweak the plan as you go, but the first draft of the color plan should help you understand if your room is getting too dark, the lighting is off or if your new color scheme just isn’t working for your room’s existing features.