Have you ever noticed how many different shades of white or beige there are? They vary from light to dark and also from tints of gray, yellow, blue, and tan. There are probably more tints than just these few, but at any rate, when you buy a piece of furniture and try placing white next to white or beige next to beige, you might see a huge difference in the colors. The same goes for the color paint you use in a room with white or beige upholstery. Mixing Different Shades of White or Beige can be tricky.
Check out this post I did a few years ago on finding the right paint tint. Finding The Right White Paint If You Have White Furniture.
Furniture upholstery is the same problem. We buy a new sofa or chair and then find that it is not the same tint of white or beige as the rest of our furniture.
I recently decided to move the sofa I had in the family room to the living room. It is smaller in scale and fits the space well, plus I love the more contemporary line of this sofa. Only problem is, now I am mixing different shades of beige and white that sometimes don’t go well together. The chair next to the sofa is a different tint of beige than the sofa.
The picture doesn’t show this as much as it shows up in person. The chair has a camel color tint background and the sofa has a gray background.
I love this chair, the upholstery is really interesting with the greek alphabet, but you can see that the background is really a soft camel colored beige.
The sofa has tints of gray and even tints of pink sometimes. The two colors really aren’t the best side by side.
We have one more element in the room that has different colors too. The chair by the window. It is more white than the other pieces and has a slight tint of green to it. How do I make all these different tints and shades of white and beige work without fighting each other?
In my case, I added a throw blanket that has white and camel colors on the arm between the sofa and chair.
The distracting color in the whole room is camel. By adding camel-colored pillows to the muddy beige sofa, it doesn’t fight with the chair next to it and by adding a plaid camel and white pillow to the chair by the window, the whole space is tied together. Now all three pieces live together in harmony. Next time you have different shades and tints of your main color, think about what would neutralize all of them and add that color to the mix.
Great tips, my friend.
Great tips. The worst problem I ever had was in my first home.
I put blue carpet in a small bedroom. It had a darker blue in the base. Never found anything to match it.