Mix Wood Colors in Interior Decorating
One of the easiest and most enjoyable aspects of interior decorating is picking out individual pieces of furniture and décor that you love. The more challenging aspect, however, is coordinating individual pieces into a harmonious, composed arrangement. This can be especially challenging when trying to coordinate wood tones. From light and bright birch, to the pleasing mid-tones of oak, to the lustrous depth of mahogany or cherry, learning how to mix wood colors in interior decorating can be a frustrating yet rewarding experience. Keep the considerations below in mind to achieve a cohesive, attractive look when matching wood tones.
Steps
- Keep your major pieces of furniture all in the same wood tone. This is the most basic step you can take towards ensuring the cohesiveness of your furniture's wood colors. Sofas, armchairs, and coffee tables, for instance, could all feature mid-toned wood, while lighter or darker wood tones are incorporated through small accessories like picture frames and lamps.
- Blend wood tones between rooms using accessories. Of course, you won't want to use a single tone of wood for the major pieces of furniture throughout your entire home. For instance, you may have 2 adjoining rooms, the first featuring beech furniture and the other featuring cherry furniture. To blend these 2 wood tones together, add accessories in each room that feature the wood tone prominent in the other room.
- Balance different wood tones throughout a room. If you do choose to use different wood tones for major pieces of furniture, try to spread them out through the room. Placing dark tones on 1 side of the room and placing lighter tones on the other will lead to an unappealing imbalance. The darker side of the room will feel "heavier."
- Mimic certain wood tones through matching upholstery. Consider the following design challenge: all of the wood furniture in your living room is dark mahogany, but the credenza that you're longing to buy is only available in a light and airy beech. To tie the credenza's look into the room, you can use a piece of furniture (like an ottoman or accent chair) that is upholstered in a warm yellowish brown that mimics the credenza's hue.
- Balance your mix of woods with your mix of colors. As a general rule, mixing a lot of different wood tones will look messy and chaotic if you also have a widely varied color scheme. Therefore, if you have lots of different colored upholstery and décor in a room, stick to a limited palette of wood tones. If you want to mix lots of different woods, try to keep your color palette subdued.
- Embrace contrast when necessary. There are certain situations in which contrasting wood tones are vital to successful design execution. For example, placing a pine dining table on pine flooring may lead the table's appearance to "wash out." In this case, contrasting a different wood with the flooring will make a more assertive, composed statement.
Tips
- Remember that solid wood furniture can always be stripped and stained a different tone. This is an excellent solution for inexpensively altering your existing pieces to fit into a composed design scheme.
- Note that painted wood, unless the grain is allowed to show through, does not often read as wood. Therefore, it does not need to be considered when mixing and matching wood tones in a room.
