Colour Design Schemes For Your Custom Build

June 22, 2023

choosing a colour for a custom home build

Where To Start?

For many of our clients, weighing out paint colours can be one of the most difficult decisions. After going through the process of designing a home from a blank canvas, coming down to the final details of choosing a colour scheme for the interior of a home can seem consuming.

From everything from pearl white to cameo to eggshell to antique white, It can be easy to feel consumed with choice paralysis, especially when colour variations are endless. You might just end up opting to go with a very neutral scheme, either with white or grey hues. For some with more eclectic furniture tastes, this might work well, but we always like to suggest that clients test out colours before shutting them down altogether. Colour can offer that extra personal touch to a home that you may not even realize you were missing.

Creating The Desired Ambiance

We never like to put our clients’ homes in a box. In the same way that we’re adverse to stereotyping or making generalizations about people when we can. Often, relating someone’s preferred design “style” to a historical trend or style can help us communicate and achieve the unique feel of someone’s personal taste. And typically this is some sort of frankensteining of ideas or influences – come together under the same roof!

While your custom home might have a mix of both modern farmhouse but also reflects your spanish-colonial or scottish-tudor roots, you want the overall atmosphere and colour scheme of the hour to feel cohesive and like your own space. Some questions you might want to ask yourself include:

What colours speak to the desire feel of the space?
What types of environments make you feel comforted?

Colour Psychology And Mood

While we understand how visually influenced we can be, we often don’t necessarily correlate our environment with our mood. Recently over the past few years there’s been an extensive amount of research coming out related to colour psychology – particularly related to health and wellbeing. A recent study carried out has shown that respondents tend to favor colours with a warm hue such as yellows, oranges, red-pink colour combinations, as well as blue-greens when they’re in an emotionally unstable state.¹ Environmentally, this makes sense that blue-green and warm colour combinations give us comfort as we’ve spend most of our ancestral history in lush natural environments very attuned to the daylighting patterns.

It’s important to remember that the way we perceive colours differs from person to person. It’s also very dependent on what they remind us of or symbolize in our lives at any given time. Culturally it also varies. For example, in many cultures black symbolizes death, mourning, mystery or bad luck, whereas in the middle east, black can represent a sign of rebirth.²

Aligning It With Your Custom Design

The home for many can be understood as a haven or sanctuary of sorts. We believe it should be treated like that, by choosing colours that align with yours or your family’s own unique style – that come from a variety of personal and cultural influences. Warming tones like burnt oranges or yellows can bring brightness and energy to a kitchen or living space that’s full of energy for hosting and endless entertainment. Cooler tones like ocean blues or moss greens can bring feelings of tranquility and calmness to a bedroom or office where focused work happens.

When it comes to actually testing and choosing colours, we’d recommend bringing in many paint samples and testing them in various rooms. Try wall tests, and leave them up for a few sleeps at least to solidify any weighted decisions. It’s also important to think about how they might pair with your furniture, and how the lighting can change the way the colour is seen!

Lastly we’d say have your whole family or all your house occupants have a say in what colours might be chosen. Choosing colours can be very subjective, and while it might be difficult to fully align everyone’s views on preferred choices, coming to a collective decision can make a home feel like it’s that much more personalized.

Get Started Today!

As dedicated custom home builders, we collaborate closely with you throughout the entire process, from the initial design phase to the final completion. Our priority is to ensure that every specific detail is carefully addressed. We provide guidance on design and colour psychology, assisting you in making difficult choices, such as selecting the perfect tile colours. Begin your design journey with Brentwell today!

Work with us today!