Top tips for decorating with colour for your mood

Sponsored by Freedom

Ever given much thought to the fact certain colours make you feel better, calmer or happier? You can apply colour psychology to your interiors to alter your mood. But it can be complicated when you live with other people who prefer different colours. Jacqui Manning, ‘the friendly psychologist,’ shares her top tips for finding a balance.

The primary colours of red, blue and yellow relate to the body, mind, the emotions and the essential balance between these 3. The trick to getting your home right is to find the right balance for you and your personality.

Angela Wright made a major breakthrough in the late 70s in our understanding of colour psychology with her discoveries about how colour really works, looking at the patterns of colour and how they relate to our personality. She found that colour does influence our mood and behaviour and if we find the right colour combination for our personality and from within harmonious groups of colour, we will feel happier in our surroundings. So it really is worth the time and effort to get it right.

Often we are decorating our homes with other people – our partners, children, and friends – and so we need to find a way through everyone’s different preferences and likes. Many of my clients discuss the stress of renovating or decorating and the negative impact it is having on their relationship, so take the time to do things properly and thoughtfully; this will benefit both the look of your place and how you feel getting there.

Top Tips

• Sit down together from the start and discuss possibilities – even if one person takes the lead, keep in mind that the others living in the house have the right to give their opinion so involve them from the start to save any angst in the future! If you have teenage children, you may need to allow them to choose a colour you don’t like, as long as they agree to paint it over when they leave home.
• Plan ahead – use tools such as magazines, Pinterest and other apps to really try your hardest to work out your style.
• Don’t rush! Creating a beautiful home takes time and if this is the first time you’ve moved in with a partner or you have bought your dream house, you want to take time so that you can feel confident in your decisions.
• Discuss your colour preferences – one of you may love the warming reds and find them a happy colour while the other may prefer cooling blues or optimistic yellow. Try and find reasons why you have a preference and then work out solutions to any differences. If you can’t agree, perhaps you stick to neutral colours for the walls but buy accessories in one colour palette for the room and see how it works. That way, you can always change things if it feels uncomfortable for one of you.
• Show some understanding – as Angela Wright found, certain colours relate to certain personality types, so while it might seem your partner or friend is simply being ‘difficult’, perhaps there are inbuilt reasons why they prefer another hue to you.
• Green light thinking – lay all of your ideas and options on the table without blocking them, even if at first some ideas seem hideous. As you go along, in the process you can whittle down your ideas and agree on colours you can all live with, but by honouring another’s choices, you are setting a collaborative tone that will be helpful.
• Remember comfort – don’t always opt for style over comfort as you will be living in your space. Something that looks amazing on the showroom floor may not suit the home environment you are wanting to create so keep in mind how it will look and feel in your house.

Everything in these images is available from Freedom.