How to Take Charge of Your Bossy Tile

When we walked into our room at the Fairmont Vancouver Airport last May, I declared, “This room was decorated BEFORE the brown trend!” It’s a game I like to play with anyone who will listen everywhere I go.

What’s the dead giveaway? The colour of the wood-stained furniture: it was all orange and yellow with no espresso brown in sight. This hotel was built in 1999, so that means this colour scheme is 16 years old.

Kitchens from the 90s were also commonly a honey or orange maple.

Renovations in hotels are obviously expensive, and this is the ONLY hotel attached to the airport in Vancouver, so I’m guessing budgets have been allocated somewhere else.

Fun fact: my first career was as a sales manager in the hotel industry.

Here’s a little vanity area in the entrance of our room:

The carpet was gold and the walls appeared to be some shade of pink beige.

This slate, below, works with a West Coast contemporary scheme. See the marsala here? This is why I don’t think that Colour of the Year is coming back anytime soon in residential or commercial decor:

What do you notice about the trim colour chosen here (below)?

The public washroom downstairs still looked funky and Westcoast Contemporary. Not dated at all:

However, the public areas in the lobby, lounge, and restaurant had just been renovated two years ago, according to our server.

Here’s what I want you to notice about the new decor that was chosen: the chairs are a grey green, and if you look, you can find that colour in the tile. The carpet, on the other hand, looks pink:

HOWEVER, depending on the light and which way I was looking at the carpet, sometimes it was exactly the colour it should have been: a green grey to relate to the upholstery and the green grey found in the slate tile. Look:

Below, it looks more taupe:

Overall of course, there was a high-end look to this installation; however, I have a theory about why the carpet looks wrong:

The small carpet sample was, most likely, exactly the right colour, but on a large scale, it changes dramatically in the light.

So here’s the lesson of the day:

Do not make colour decisions on large, important items like this without ordering the largest size sample you can get.

Here’s what the decorator did to coordinate with the extremely varied and colourful slate tile:

You can see that the old colour scheme (on the right) picked up the orange in the tile with one additional, unrelated colour.

How do you bring current colours into a dated colour scheme? You choose the more current colour (in this case, the grey green from the tile), which gives you permission to choose a second unrelated colour (in this case, the blue from the image on the left).

In the second colour scheme, would the hallways and decor that included the slate look even more amazing if ALL the colours had been chosen from the tile (given there’s 5 or 6 colours in it)?

Technically, yes. However, that’s not the choice this design team made.

Hope this gives you some freedom over your own bossy tile if you have some you need to decorate around!

If you’d like to transform the way you see colour, Register here.

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We’ve Come a Long Way Baby (Since I first started this course)

Do you Give your Clients Exactly What they Want?