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You finally got to purchase a fresh new sofa, you’re so excited to see it in your room! And then your heart sinks, because although you love it. It looks off.
In fact, the whole room suddenly looks not quite right. NOW WHAT??
Arianna BelleI recently received this note:
Maria, I found you after making an expensive upholstery color choice for my new sofa. I’m wondering if I should reupholster it. Before I found you in your world of undertones, I was unable to articulate what the problem was with the new sofa in the room, other than to say it looks gray and brown during the day.
Now I know that many of the undertones in the room are orange based, which I love, but unfortunately the new sofa has taupe undertones. We don’t want to paint the walls right now. They’re painted Benjamin Moore, Devon Creme. And so I’m assuming I need to find an orange beige fabric for the sofa. Is that correct?
Help! I don’t want to make any more expensive mistakes.
Click here to see my Colour Rescue solutions for this room over on YouTube!
What’s holding you back?
I’ve been in many, many homes over my 25 year career where people are hanging on to their old and dated rugs because they were really expensive back in the day. But carpet prices have become a lot less precious.
Now that we can buy them online, it’s a lot easier and more accessible. The traditional looking carpet with lots of heavy black is weighing this room down so that the fresh new sofa and creamy pale walls can not lift.
So if you’re working really hard to make an old “expensive” rug work it’s highly likely that it’s holding you hostage.
I want to give you permission to take a few minutes to imagine what your room could look like if you changed out the rug.
Have a little fun and create a mood board! You’ll learn how easy this is in my Shop Online course.
Because so often you’re working much to hard to make something work that’s just not working.
And it’s much more important to create a room that fills you with joy!
That said, there are ways to work with heavier formal antique rugs as True Colour Expert Erika Ward shows us in this post,
Read more: How to Beautifully Update your Persian (Oriental) Rug
I created a couple beautiful mood boards for this room, so pop over to the video to see how much fun I had!
Hint: there is an undertone conflict between the wall colour and the sofa, can you tell what it is?
It’s sooo easy to go wrong if you don’t know how to identify the subtle undertone shifts of neutrals!
Neutrals aren’t Neutral
The whole concept of a “neutral” is supposed to be that “it goes with everything” RIGHT??
You probably know from a similar experience that’s simply not the case. Neutrals can be anything but- well, neutral.
And it’s important to know when COLOUR is the better solution.
What everyone Should Know About Taupe
And throughout the grey trend, the go-to neutral was taupe, because it’s cooler than beige, and warmer than grey. And now, since trends are warming up again from stark black and white, taupe is back before it even left the room.
What everyone Should Know about Beige
And beige is definitely and officially back. Which means that choosing colour and furnishings just got a lot more complicated than choosing black or white for everything.
Not that choosing white was ever as simple as it seems
I think aside from everyone wanting FRESH the reason the white trend took over (HGTV aside) is that it seems simple. Just like black seems like the obvious choice. The truth is, those who know, know that the perfect white is sometimes not even technically white.
This fall I want to give you everything I know about colour
It’s time to say good bye to expensive colour mistakes for good. Sign up today to save your spot in my fall Expert Colour & Design Training. This fall WE’RE BACK IN PERSON!
Sign up for early bird access to my two live in person dates VANCOUVER and DALLAS. Since we’re together we can continue our conversation by having an evening visit after class!
And I can’t wait to meet you!! We’ll talk about all things colour and decorating. In two days I’ll basically hand you my 25 years plus of experience simply packaged into an easy to learn and use system.
And if you’ve been dreaming about creating a new business in colour, there has NEVER been a better time. Social media provides a platform to reach more potential clients than ever before.
My course is exactly what you need to get started. And you’ll have deeply discounted access to the best colour tools as well as my Business of Colour and Business of eDesign courses to jump start your new career!
Sign up here for all live in person and virtual live dates!
See you this Fall!