I recently received this question from a follower:
I’m desperately searching for a new rug for our family room… I came across this one, but I’m worried it might be too much color. We have built ins in this space that’s I’ve incorporated a lot of different colors…I think my couch is violet grey, but there are couch covers on it that might be a different undertone. The walls are pale oak (taupe). Please help!
Neutral does not mean “goes with anything”
I see this mistake all the time because you can’t just buy a gray sofa and expect it to magically work with every colour. I actually think that’s one of the reasons the gray trend has hung on for so long. People assume gray is “neutral,” so anything goes, right?
It’s one of the biggest decorating myths in the design world.
When an all-neutral room feels drab or lifeless, the instinct is to throw a bunch of colour at it. But that doesn’t work.
Colour only looks intentional when it’s repeated throughout the room. And just as importantly, the dominant neutral that’s already there, in this case, the gray sofa, also needs to be repeated.
If the rug is the only place introducing all those colours, and the gray sofa is the only gray in the room, everything feels disconnected instead of beautifully layered. That’s why so many people end up blaming the rug when the real problem is that the room isn’t coordinated.
In this room, the rug is doing all the heavy lifting. It introduces dozens of happy, saturated colours—but where do those colours go next?
Nowhere.
The sofa is gray, the gallery wall is mostly muted. Most of the accessories are also neutral. The only thing that relates to the rug is… the rug. So instead of feeling intentional, it feels disconnected.
That’s exactly why the homeowner starts thinking, “Maybe I need a different rug.” And she does because there’s many colours in this rug but not a stitch of the biggest colour in the room, which is the gray so the room doesn’t look like a designer was there yet.
With this many colours in the rug, we need a sofa that picks up one of the colours like this:
And then if yellow is a colour we love, we repeat it. I am showing a very basic computer generated example but I think you get my point.
Make sure key colours are repeated
This wallpaper image arrived in my inbox last week and I noticed the same thing happening, all the colours on the colour wheel but not one of them is the grey headboard.
Whoever styled this image to sell this wallpaper pattern also thought grey goes with everything, but better yet, to bring it to life, let’s add all the colours.
But the look we really have is this: I don’t like my gray headboard so let me throw a bunch of colour at it.
This is the same mistake I see all the time.
I added a different paper to go with the headboard and now the look we have is that the headboard was chosen on purpose to work with the wallpaper.
In one of most recent Decorate or Renovate!? makeovers, the homeowner had a huge, colourful cow hanging over espresso sofas with taupe walls and pink beige shag carpeting (this episode is coming soon).
I’m illustrating the same point here and that is a colourful piece of art in an all neutral room will not save it from looking drab.
When colour or neutral appears only once, it looks random. A neutral sofa is not like a pair of jeans. As I’ve shown many times in my makeover shows, when someone has too many neutrals the room can’t support a strong colour. That’s when the principles of good decorating need to be introduced.
Contrast, interesting shapes and texture. That’s how professional rooms come together.
So before you replace the rug, ask yourself:
Have I actually repeated these colours throughout the room?
One final Create Your Dream Home cohort opens soon. It’s the last time everything sits in one course: the full Killam Colour System® foundation, decorating, and timeless finishes. Future cohorts will be shorter, so get on the waitlist here.
Related posts:
From Gray Walls to Happy Colour; Before & After
Very helpful examples and information!
In the room with the grey sofa: if replacing the sofa is not possible in the short term, could one improve the room by repeating the grey of the sofa in a couple other locations in the room, in addition to repeating some colors from the rug? ( something corresponding to how you repeated the headboard’s grey in the wallpaper)
Yes, you could repeat the gray in a piece of art or something like that. Thanks for your comment, Maria
I have a 12 year old gray sofa from when I was just learning about decorating, and these days it’s the only gray thing in my house! I have a colorful patchwork quilt folded over the whole back of it, and plan to get a sofa in my favorite color when we replace it.
I actually prefer the grey sofa in the space. Some of the colours in the rug and grey sofa are repeated in the artwork, pillows and accessories in just the right amounts. I think it works quite well without trying too hard.