Using Color in Your Home

You often hear that it’s important to use neutrals in your home décor, but it’s the color that gives your home the personality that it has. Picking the right colors and using them properly can give your home a new life.

Lindy Allen, from Four Chairs Furniture and Design, shares her advice on using color in your home.


It’s important that you love every room in your house, and for different reasons. Your home is the place to invest yourself, your time, your money and your energy…its where you live, not just physically but spiritually and emotionally. At the end of the day a room should be a beautiful reflection of who you are and what you love.

Color is the decorating glue that holds a home together. A beautiful color scheme can be simple and soft, or bright and bold, it can make you feel different ways, calm and relaxed, or excited and energized. It ties your home’s flow together and makes a home seem thoughtful, well planned and organized. There are no hard fast rules about color, even though color is such an important choice in decor. The right color for your home and your room is the one that makes you feel motivated, relaxed, happy, calm or energized. Color preferences come from all around our world, maybe you loved the color of your grandma’s sofa you sat on when you were little, maybe you love the white on white tones you witnessed in a dream home magazine. Color is personal and in the end the right answer is what works for you. Start with what you love…open a box of crayons, what do you pick first?

I love blue with white, it is fresh. It reminds me of the ocean. When I paint a room blue it makes it feel “beachy” to me and I LOVE LOVE the beach. I love linen looking fabrics, stripes and patterns. Rooms designed this way makes me feel free and warm and relaxed. Maybe a starting point for someone else is a view out their window, the color of a bouquet of fresh flowers, or a fabric you have fallen in love with, my point is there is a starting point for EVERYONE! You just have to find it!

I tell my clients that a great place to start if they are at a loss of what their favorite color is (this happens with age…) is to go to their closet. Yes, your clothes closet. What color do you LOVE to wear? What do you have most of? What do you feel comfortable in? What color dominates your comfy clothes collection…lots of answers can be found in your closet! I also encourage people to have some sort of collection of photos that “wow” them. You can cut them out of magazines…which is all we could do pre-pinterest…but now you can make boards on pinterest.com or houzz.com and keep inspiration right on you hand-held mobile device…its so easy!

Its great to “pop” different colors throughout different areas of your home. If 2 rooms touch or transition right into each other it is good to use the same color, even if slightly lighter or darker, just to connect the rooms. Connecting rooms need connecting colors.

Color can do more than just energize or relax us…it can make small spaces seem larger, by using light pale blues or grays and white accents and trim work, also white ceilings draw the eye up and give a feeling of openness. I have a series of favorite gray colors Useful Gray for a warm gray tone, Silver Strand for a tiny blue tint (if you have a surplus of wood work in your home silver strand may be the answer, it neutralizes orangy tones and gives a fresh new look and feel to a previously brown and boring pallet!) Using bold and dark color can make a large space seem smaller as well. In theater rooms we often use this trick. It brings the walls a little closer, painting the ceiling and trim work darker as well. A favorite dark color for walls right now is “Dovetail” by Sherwin Williams. It is a warm gray, perfect for masculine offices, dramatic walls, and still works with a neutral pallet.



If you need ideas upon ideas come into Four Chairs Furniture’s store in Lindon, it is ever-changing and ever-inspirational when it comes to color. Color is what Four Chairs was founded on. We love to do color, and to do color right! When you see the set up that you love…snap a picture, that way you have a reference when you come back ready to do your room! You can find more at http://4-chairs.com/

And you can see the Edge Home, decorated by Lindy as part of the Utah Valley Parade of Homes.
It’s located at 2273 West 1300 South, Lehi. You can learn more about the Parade of Homes at http://www.uvparade.com/

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