Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Stimulate Your Home With Orange Home Accessories

By Lucas King


Like a burst of the gentle warmth of the sun for your walls, it's hard not to notice orange. It's a color as powerful as it is healing. Orange can be a wonderful shade on the walls, but it's not always an easy color to choose.

Much like its explosive cousin, red, orange can easily overpower a room, but fall is calling for this color. Using a little control and imagination, adding orange -- whether the shade is warm and welcoming or bright and festive -- to your living space will invigorate your surroundings.

Fortunately, it doesn't take a large dosage of orange to make an impression. Simply adding place mats, napkins, or pumpkin coloured tablecloths can give your dining room a splash of fall color. Paired with a rich green, orange is simply captivating. Or try re-covering dining room chairs in a deep burnt orange for a fresh look that gives the whole room a lift. Accent pillows, throws, or silk flowers in sunset hues can help you easily incorporate orange into your decor.

Using another color with orange helps it stand out that much more. A perfect example is the bright indigo blue that's often used with a bright orange in Mexico and the South-western U.S. A dark or muted shade of orange, paired with brown and beige, almost reads as a neutral, yet signals the neutrals from fading into blandness. Eggplant, deep teal, cornflower blue, red, yellow and pink are all flattering to orange and look fresh.

In neutral rooms, particularly those heavy on beige rooms with brown or umber undertones, a medium tone of orange looks trendy, yet calm and relaxing. Remember, if you use a strong orange shade on the wall or in accents, be sure to use it across the room to balance and unify the space. You don't want all that color just standing there by itself looking more like a sore thumb than an essential part of your design.

But what if you really love orange and want to make more of an impact?

Using orange on the wall takes adventurousness, but done right, looks extraordinary. The obstacle with orange is that it changes with the light. Before settling on a shade, paint a large swatch on the wall so you can see what it looks like at different times of the day. And remember that orange is a color that can appear very bright, so pick a version that's a shade or two deeper than what appeals to you. Once on the wall, it will be much brighter than it appears on the paint chip.

If you want to use orange but are apprehensive, give it a test run by painting a single accent wall, and if you like the result, add the colour to other walls.

Orange doesn't belong everywhere. In the bedroom, it can be too stimulating. In bright, sunlit rooms, orange can be intense. But in dining rooms, dark rooms with little direct sunlight, a breakfast nook, or interior hallways, this dynamic and vibrant hue can really shine.




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