What Even Is A Color Story?
A color story is as it sounds, it's telling the story of your home through color. How do you want your home to feel to your family and to visitors? Do you want each room to evoke something different, or do you want the entire home to have the same feeling? It's your home, so do with it what you will. If you do want your home to tell a story, I can't say I'm an expert at creating a color story for a home, but I can explain the process that I've gone through to figure out what story I want our home to tell. I want our home to feel welcoming, but for it to feel like it doesn't take itself too seriously. I want our home to feel like a merging to two styles that come together to create something unique (Travis and I don't necessarily have the same design style... and that's ok). So, with that, the color of your home should do just that, tell a story.
Our Homes' Color Story Base
So, where do you even start with the color story of an entire home? It can seem very overwhelming, but I would recommend starting with any accent color you already have in your home, and that you like. If you are completely starting from a blank slate, I would recommend analyzing your home in small doses or start from your front door and move through the rest of your house and figure it out room by room.
For us, we already had the base of our dark green wall in our living room. I made a blog post about painting this wall (see here) last year, but this wall is what we wanted to set as our "base". Our home is open-concept which means our entryway, flex room, living room, dining room and kitchen are all connected. With that being said, we want to make sure that colors in these other areas, that aren't the living room, coordinate with the dark green wall.
Beginning the Color Story Process
To even start developing our home's color story, I went and picked up a Sherwin Williams paint deck (which has basically every color known to man) and began by finding the Sherwin Williams color that is closest to the dark green wall. Tha paint color on our living room wall is actually not a Sherwin Williams color, so I tried to match it as close as possible.
The color of Sherwin Williams that's the closest to our living room wall color is their 'Vogue Green' from their Historic series. This is the color I will base the entryway and kitchen accent colors off of.
Now, just because I picked up the Sherwin Williams fan deck does not mean that I plan on painting in each of these rooms mentioned above. This fan deck is just for me to get an idea of what color will go with each room and will compliment the living room wall. These colors can be implemented in small accent decor or florals, it doesn't need to be anything over the top.
The Kitchen
Now, the kitchen color was a bit difficult to figure out. We are dealing with very dark espresso cabinets, satin nickel hardware, a speckled granite countertop with grays, browns, creams and a bit of gold/tan, and either a cream or a light gray tile for our new backsplash. With all of the dark colors of the cabinets and silver tones of the cabinet handles and appliances, there needs to be some warmth added. I want our kitchen to feel warm and inviting rather than cold and dark.
I toyed with the idea of introducing maybe a mauve or a gray/blue, but I still wasn't convinced by either of these colors, even though either one would be beautiful. I then thought about maybe a terracotta color. We have some terracotta hues in our living room and implementing this color in the kitchen would be a nice nod. Toning it back from a true terracotta, I chose the color 'Wickerwork' which had a nice balance of taupe, orange, brown and gold. I think it will bring just enough warmth without being overbearing or 'in-your-face'.
The Entryway
With our entryway, it's very long and narrow. There isn't very much natural light that gets into this space, so a lighter accent color is ideal for this space. This entryway will actually get accent paint. I also did a blog post about our entryway design and what we had planned for it (see here) and we plan on doing a wainscot up to 6' up the wall and have an accent paint color on the 3' of wall above the wainscot. Once I found 'Evergreen Fog' by Sherwin Williams, I knew it had to be in for consideration as the color in the entryway. It's the perfect mixture of gray and green and coordinates with the other colors that were chosen for our home perfectly.
Guest Bedroom
In our guest bedroom, we do not have any plans to re-design either of our guest bedrooms just yet, but if we were to re-design one of these rooms tomorrow, I would love to do a mauve in one of these rooms. Mauve is such an ambiguous color that can either be dressed up or dressed down from a design standpoint. I want our guest rooms to feel inviting and comfortable and mauve is one of those universal colors that can achieve that. Of course, my ego takes hold and I like 'Chelsea Mauve'. It's a nice mix of purple and gray and pairs nicely with the 'Evergreen Fog' that would be the color right outside of this room.
Owner's Bedroom
I haven't shown the design of our bedroom much, but we have a dark navy colored blue as our base color with our curtains and a bench at the end of our bed being blue. I thought about other colors to implement in this room and in my mind, there were two routes. One would be introducing a cognac leather brown and the other would be layering blues in the room. I chose to try layering the blues in this room. From a design standpoint, choosing this route of layering the blues will challenge me as a designer and this dusty blue by Sherwin Williams, 'Blustery Sky', color seemed perfect.
