With the beautiful season approaching, we go in search of colors for a decoration full of cheerfulness, freshness and energy. Discover 20 color inspirations to copy for your interior.
1. A powder pink for a hot living room
This apartment has all of the good-looking Haussmannian. “I wanted to respect the memory of the place”, she assures, but no question of giving in to “political correctness”. These frank and strong colors wanted by Geraldine, it is her token of good humor for the gray days.
2. A mint watered headboard
If the architect Marie Deroudilhe bet on white in decoration punctuated by flat areas of bright tones to transform and modernize this 60 m2 Parisian, she chose softness for the rooms with blue, the most popular color of the color chart . A single azure wall is enough to redesign the space: reassuring, this shade which coats the bed and creates a “nest effect” encourages dreaming and relaxation. The other walls, left white, highlight this delicacy and avoid any coldness.
3. A living room with 100% blue walls
It was the Double G architectural firm that Ashley Maddox and her husband Cuotemoc Malle, a couple of globetrotters who divide their life between Paris and Los Angeles, asked to renovate their foot- ashore at Saint-Germain-des-Près. For them, color creates the mood. Thus, the living room dedicated to television was entirely lacquered in Prussian blue . This chic and original tone also knows how to create an intimate atmosphere.
4. A refreshing green wall
In this rest and relaxation room that adjoins the swimming pool at the Avalon Hotel in Los Angeles, decorator Kelly Wearstler has chosen the aquamarine hues of the Californian ocean to paint this Op art wall . This revisited modernism recalls the crazy era of the American dream and utopian sets in cinemascope and technicolor.
5. A kitchen with bright colors
For her house in Quercy, Vicky Thornton preferred a basic interior that requires minimal maintenance, with walls clad in panels of compressed wood chips, an insulating material left raw. But for this English architect, sobriety does not exclude bright colors, quite the contrary. In the kitchen, next to the wooden shuttering cupboards and the zinc worktops, the splashback has been painted in buttercup yellow which illuminates it and makes it cheerful. To the decoration, yellow always brings its clarity and liveliness.
6. A bedroom with khaki walls
In her beautiful home in Aude, New York decorator Annie Moore has reinvented everything by avoiding regional clichés. His fad? The color that guides most of its decisions. In each room, she has chosen very soft mineral nuances. The bedroom is a perfect example with its light khaki walls . From gray, this color borrowed elegance and simplicity, from green an impression of calm. It highlights the moldings and ornaments of the pier, it enhances the red of the floor tiles. Finally, mixed with the taupe linen of the bed, it draws a shade of timeless refinement.
7. Neon shades in the bathroom
It is the color that leads the dance in the house that the furniture designer “Younow” Florence Jaffrain imagined in a former factory in Pantin. In the bathroom, she opted for a strong pink wall , bright and attractive, which gives a healthy glow. To echo it, she had fun painting some tiles, forming an offset checkerboard full of fantasy and energy.
8. A blue for the entrance
To avoid a possible feeling of emptiness in their Alsatian house of 500 m2, Sandrine and Hervé have bet on the most daring colors. Was the first floor landing large enough and sparsely furnished? Swallowed up by a wave of dazzling blue – everything has been repainted, even the custom-made console and the top of the stool – it becomes a radiant setting highlighted by the old oak parquet. Both original and user-friendly, it does not need anything else to become a part in its own right.
9. A bright yellow living room
Rather than move, Françoise preferred to change everything in her 60 m2 Paris. To give it the impression of being elsewhere and visually enlarge the space, the architect Marie Deroudilhe played a lot with color. Thus, the living room could look like a banal white box if one of the walls were not painted in the same absinthe green as the armchair by Eero Saarinen. This lively and tangy tone gives the room all its character.
10. Lagoon blue walls in the bathroom
Catalan architect José Luis Aloso Eijo designed this holiday home as two large sunny white cubes which, through their huge floor-to-ceiling windows, offer spectacular views of the Costa Brava, Spain. The sea is everywhere, including inside, even in the bathroom. This is lined with lagoon blue glass paste tiles that create an impression of well-being, as if one were diving into the Mediterranean.
11. A multi-colored bathroom wall
Rather than moving to live with the family without stepping on each other, Eva and Pépito preferred to rethink their 60 m2 Paris. If the architects of the Atelier Premier Etage, Claire Escalon and Nicolas Lanno, took care of the restructuring, it was Eva who took care of the colors: in the apartment, the blue of all shades and the ocher that create a peaceful atmosphere. The only daring is the bathroom where all the colors of the rainbow blend together, each more vivid than the next, for an energizing patchwork that extends to the frame of the bathtub.
12. A dark green wall
In Cendrine Dominguez’s dining room , an autumnal green (Resource) highlights her black and white photographs. “I had very thin shelves designed to put them up like in a gallery.” Left, photo of Christo, right, Sarah Moon. On the ground, shot of James Owen.
13. An alcove with bright green walls
Between pop colors and seventies aesthetics straight out of the Star Trek series, the architect Pedro Gadanho has transfigured the great classic building of Guta Moura Guedes, president and co-founder of Experimenta Design, located some sixty kilometers from Lisbon. This one, avid reader, wanted a “niche” to benefit from her collection of books. Mission accomplished with this bookcase designed as a large capsule, a real intimate space within the living room itself. All in turquoise blue, the color of the holidays, it allows Guta to read in peace.
14. A shade of gray for the bedroom
In Jumeirah Palm, a man-made island in Dubai, the Swako family have moved into a large impersonal house that they have tried to tame with simple solutions. Soft tones thus softened the stiffness of the decor and balanced the height of the volumes. For the bedroom walls , a very city-like mouse gray – unexpected on a beach – was chosen: it could have been mundane or moody if it were combined with stronger colors. Combined with black and other shades of gray – pearl, taupe, turtledove – it becomes as elegant as it is stylish.
15. A purple wall as a headboard
In East London, the two architects Patrick Theis and Soraya Khan have set up their family apartment on the three floors of an old factory from the 1950s. In this controlled architecture, color is much more than a simple element of decoration, “it modifies space and governs our sensibilities”, as Le Corbusier writes . In the palette of this great architect, Soraya has chosen a vitamin orange for the kitchen, a luminous turquoise for the entrance and, perfectly suited to the bedroom, an Indian pink, as a refuge full of warmth and comfort.
16. A room in pop colors
From a former industrial building in Pantin, Florence Jaffrain, creator of the “Younow” furniture line, has made a house full of cheerfulness where she lives with her three children. Color stands out as a star: omnipresent in Florence’s creations – here the “Bonheur” seats and the “Wave” sofa – it appears in each room in the form of a painted wall . Mimosa yellow for the kitchen, pearl gray for the bedroom … As for the living room, it is a frank chlorophyll green that marks the living room with its freshness.
17. A purple wall in the living room
Creator of gardens and terraces, Jacques Leseur has set up his loft in a former Parisian printing house. By large flat areas of warm colors, he was able to give life to the immense volumes lit by metal workshop windows. In the four-meter-high living room which mixes purple and khaki, a section of aubergine wall conceals the staircase that leads to the mezzanine. By frankly delimiting it, he makes the room warmer and gives it a theatrical side, without depriving it of its clarity thanks to the white that surrounds it.
18. A kitchen in fifties colors
English designer Orla Kiely has moved to Clapham, south London, in a house she has completely renovated. What she wanted above all was a large kitchen that did not look like … a kitchen, rather a living room to spend the evenings with the family. Very inspired by the creativity of the fifties, Orla has reproduced the star colors on the facades of the central island : orange, ocher, beige, olive green … Atypical colors for a kitchen that appeals to parents and children alike.
19. A red wall in the bathroom
It is rare to choose red for decoration, as this color – that of passion – can be powerful and enveloping. In a bathroom, on the other hand, it is perfect for invigorating. This is why, in their apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés lifted by the Double G agency, Ashley Maddox and Cuotemoc Malle abandoned white for carmine: a lacquer for the bathtub and, from floor to ceiling, custom-made cement tiles in exactly the same tone. When it’s red, everything moves.
20. A room in primary colors
It was Le Corbusier’s collaborator, André Wogenscky, who, in the 1960s, built this villa on stilts in Saint-Brévin-l’Océan, in Loire-Atlantique. Geometry, raw concrete, functional layout and fully glazed facade, the house could appear monastic if the colors did not upset the atmosphere: associated with the tones of the exceptional design pieces, the sunny yellow walls of the living room bring the necessary fantasy and brighten up the days.
