Decorating Your Apartment with a Neutral Color Pallete

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Decorating Your Apartment with a Neutral Color Pallete

Staff Writer · May 11, 2010

Using a neutral color palette when decorating an apartment is an excellent way to add harmony and peacefulness to your decor. Typically neutral colors consist of hues of beige, gray, tan, cream or taupe. These types of shades and tints can be found in nature and lend a natural, understated beauty to your apartment home.

A Clean Simple Style

Using neutral colors allow the decorator to bring out the natural beauty of, say, hardwoods or even metals, glass or natural fabrics like cotton or linen. Such colors are a great way to tie in the design elements of a room together so it looks clean while permitting the natural furnishings and decor to be highlighted in an understated way.

Neutral Colors Work Well with Many Types of Designs

Whether you choose a more modern decor, eclectic styling or even Country French, using neutral colors will create a harmonious feel because such tones maintain a consistency throughout each living area using soft contrasts to impart calmness and serenity. For instance, say you choose the neutral colors you find along the seashore for your color scheme. Hues such as stone, sand, pale blue and green can wash walls and ceilings and offer a backdrop for dashes of colors in accessory items such as fabrics, draperies, rugs, window treatments, carpets, throw-pillows, paintings and lamp shades. Therefore, neutral colors are an exemplary way of combining styles or transitioning from one type of design to another.

Neutral Colors Open Up Spaces

Not only does a neutral color palette provide a consistency that promotes harmony throughout a living space, it also opens up any spaces that are limited in size. While dark colors tend to make an area look smaller, neutral colors open up a living area, which is a nice feeling when you live in an apartment home. Neutral colors are helpful in playing down certain doors or walls as well and emphasize the natural beauty of furnishings and fabrics. Use textured paint for a rustic influence or a simple wash of white to enhance the look of, say, a leather couch.

Matching the Undertones of Neutral Colors

While you may believe neutral colors are devoid of color, this isn’t the case as neutral hues have undertones that should be color-coordinated with your other furnishings, windows treatments and accessories. For instance, a neutral shade such as beige can have an undertone of tan, gold or pink so make this distinction as you decorate. Likewise, whites often can have tints of peach, blue, yellow or ivory subtly showing in their hues.

Add Earth Tones with a Neutral Palette

Earth tones, such as the colors of nature—brown, terracotta, and umber—work well with most neutrally colored apartments. Such colors lend a depth and impart of sense of comfort in any decorating scheme. When combined with fabrics made of grass cloths or cotton and flooring and furnishings made of wood, they make a neutral color scheme even more rich and inviting. Integrating such colors in a neutral color scheme creates a sense of diversity while maintaining the constancy and softness of the overall decor.

Neutral colors work well in small spaces. Use them to impact the looks of your apartment home.

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