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Styling with Colour | Create Your Own Palette for Your Home

In my job as a designer, a 10-colour palette has evolved as the best starting point for decorating a space. This palette gives me positive boundaries to work with and, whether I end up using two, four, six, or all of the colours, allows me to play with the mood of a room or house and ensures an effortlessly cohesive end result. Over the past 15 years, many of my dream palettes have been brought to life as house paints with Murobond and if these colours speak to you, feel free to use them as your own. But you can also create your own 10-colour palette, an exquisite personal colour box you can refer to time and again as you curate your space to bring joy to your precious corner of the world.

Here’s how...

 

The first step | Start at home

Start by walking around your home. What draws your eye? Are there special objects you treasure? It’s likely that colour will be a part of what makes them so special to you. You might be drawn to a porcelain bowl, a postcard, a pair of earrings, an embroidered tablecloth, or the print on your favourite item of clothing.
Consider everything: not just jewellery, clothes and decor, but food, photographs, anything made with fabric or paper, solid colours and patterns, silverware and ceramics, art, buttons, ribbons and trims. Make a note, snap a photo, or—even better—physically bring these objects together to see how they speak to each other.

 

Wanting to explore more of these delicate tones in the Paper Whites collection? Read about the inspiration & shop the swatches

  

 

Look to Nature

Nature can be the most magnificent source of inspiration, as it reveals colour combinations you would seldom imagine and which never disappoint. I once did an entire shoot based entirely around the colours I observed on a single beautiful butterfly. In just about every natural landscape, whether on the coast, or in the desert, in a rainforest, or the park down the road, it’s possible to observe nature’s unparalleled colour palette and borrow its natural pairings.You might find inspiration in feathers, leaves, flowers, rocks, trees, water or the ever-changing sky.

 

 

 Observe beyond the Obvious

As your eye becomes used to searching out colour that speaks to you, you’ll start to notice it everywhere, in the falling-off-label on an old bottle, a swizzle stick, coins, a weathered shop sign, crumbly slate, a scene from a favourite movie, or even evoked in the pages of a novel. Again, take photos, make notes, and add to your growing colour collection.

 

 
 

Feeling inspired by the neutrals in these images?  Read about the inspiration behind the foundation collection & shop the swatches

 

 

Pick up on favoured colours

Soon it’ll become obvious that you are drawn to similar hues over and over again. Now it’s time to start playing.
Put together a selection of the pieces you’ve collected, or play on a Pinterest board like this one if your collection is purely digital, and see what kind of colour palette reveals itself. Add and subtract items until it takes on a visual order, letting a kind of natural balance emerge between lights, darks and neutrals.
This will vary dramatically from person to person depending on their taste, so you can happily ignore colour “rules”—there are no right and wrong combinations because it’s your colour box and this is all about finding what speaks to you and instinctively pleases your eye. If you love very deep, dramatic colours and they dominate your palette, let that be.
I try to select one physical item or image that best represents each colour I keep coming back to. In my experience, I usually end up with around ten distinct colours here, but you may end up with a few more or less. Bundle up these objects and take them to Murobond to match them to paint samples.
By the time you’ve brought together your ten different colours, most of the time a cohesive palette is achieved, with some colours that blend harmoniously, and others that bounce off each other a little more energetically, creating a beautiful contrast.
You can continue to use this palette as the basis for future decorating and shopping adventures, so be sure to keep a physical or digital record of your final colour box selection.

 

 

Drawn to the moodiness of the Indigo Blues collection? Read about the inspiration & shop the swatches

 

 

Live in your colour collection

I love the immediacy of paint and the fact that you can completely change a space in an afternoon’s work, so I’d encourage you to surround yourself with the colours you love. It’s time to buy some sample pots of a few of your colours. Paint large sheets of paper (make sure it’s white paper so the colour is true) which you can tape up around the room and move them around the walls so you can study the results at different times of day in natural and artificial light. This is very important as the appearance of a paint colour can change depending on the size and orientation of the room, as well as the other colours and elements in the space, such as furniture and art. Give yourself at least 24 hours to live with the colour before you make a decision. 

 

If these colours encapsulate your interest, browse the NbyNW collection,  Read about the inspiration & shop the swatches

 

You’ll be able to use your colours in varying combinations. In some rooms you’ll want to be quiet and subtle, utilising the softer, more neutral tones you’ve selected. Other spaces will call for louder, denser colour, pattern and texture.
And remember, if you don’t like it, or you botch it up, or your eye simply becomes restless for something new, you can always paint over the top and start again anytime you like.
 Browse my colour palettes for Murobond here if you need more inspiration, or start on your own now
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