I take my cue from the architure of the house. I have a mix. For the rooms that are very open to each other (living, dining, front hall and up the stairs), I painted all the same color. I feel like they do need to be the same, or at least complimentary. My bedrooms and bath upstairs, however, are all totally unrelated colors, 1 mild and netural, 1 medium and colorful, and 2 pretty dark and colorful. They are all small rooms; I do not factor that into the color decision. I don't have any accent walls...I like the whole room to be the same color.

My house is different in each room also and we get lots of compliments as well. Believe it or not, I have actually been asked by more neutral lovers to help them choose paint colors for their home. Let's see, starting as you enter. The kitchen is a soft yellow but is the previous owners choice since we haven't gotten to it yet. The living room is a golden color with white wall to wall builtins with the interior of the builtins an olive green. The hallway is two colors, upper portion is a rust red and the lower a butter yellow. The foyer is chocolate brown on the upper portion and the butter yellow on the lower. The foyer ceiling is silver sage which is a beautiful blue. Our hall bath is a beautiful golden color that has flesh undertones. The ceiling is the rust red from the hallway. Our masterbedroom a burnished brown. My daughters room has 17 vertical stripes around the room, black, hot pink, orange, 3 tones of lime green. My son's room is a true orange with an 8'superman, a glow in the dark batman symbol above his bed and a 8'tall by 6' wide incredible hulk painted on his wall.Oh and last but not least, my office is raspberry pink on three walls and on the other a diamond pattern of lighter pink and the raspberry pink with teal scrolls in the points. The colors came from a sari that I purchased to use as a window curtain. So you see not for everyone but somehow it works.

Similar to bungalow house; the rooms that are open to each other get the same color walls, and the styling of our old house architecture influences the color choices. The other rooms have different colors, but the trim throughout the house will be consistent in that it is shades of brown. We've used light colors to keep the house feeling light and bright. The rooms have generally the same feeling because of the age of the house (110+ years old), although there is (or will be) more of a regional Southwestern flavor in some parts of the house than in others. We haven't used dark wall colors because some of the walls are stucco and it seems dark paint would obscure the texture and wouldn't feel right, and we wanted to avoid creating a dark, oppressive environment.

I've got a different color for just about every room. The public rooms coordinate -- though they are decidedly different from each other. But some of the bedrooms are just complete one-offs. I LOVE color, and everyone who visits my home compliments our colors, without prompting, so it can't be all bad! The colors are (mostly) saturated and rich. I'm actually relived to find I'm not the only one who has done this!

Here's a sampling:

Master bedroom

Guest room

Kitchen/breakfast area

Master bath

Family room

Another guest room

Living room

Dining room

I love seeing everyone else's colors. Bring them on!

dianeadele,

Does your wallpaper, by any chance, look like this? I can't really tell from your small photo...

Dainaadele, the walls in my house are light but not white. I don't have light walls because I "settle" for it or because I am afraid of color. I am not afraid that dark colors will make my rooms look small. You paint darker colors because you like how they make you feel. I paint the colors I do because I like how they make me feel. Dark red walls, orangey walls, bright green walls make me twitch. I don't like the feel they give me.

The walls in my main rooms are Oak Buff which is a warm soft beige. My bedroom and laundry room are a soft seafoam green. My bathrooms are light sage. My kids picked their own colors, one is soft coral and one is off white.

These colors make me happy and calm. So I do not settle. Now there are some deeper colors I like. Some deeper blues and greens attract me. I also like golden or yellow rooms if they aren't too yellow.

"Same color throughout the house, or different colors in every room?"

We custom built our home several years ago. We had the freedom to paint the house as we wished, but we choose to paint the entire house in a soft tan and the trimwork and moulding is white. It is just our personal preference, for us, the lighter walls are soothing. All of our flooring whether it is wood, tile or carpeting is light with most rooms having bold colored persian rugs. The light walls and flooring make a nice contrast to our furnishings which trend towards traditional cherry and mahagony.

"Are you the type that likes the whole house to have a similar scheme/feeling, or does each room represent a different feeling?"

Each room represents a different feeling although our taste is traditional and mostly formal. The colors used in each room for the draperies, rugs and furniture tend to be bold colors such as red, green, pumpkin, blue etc.

Do you stick with lighter colors and maybe a single bold accent wall because you are afrid to fill the whole room with the color? Or do you prefer there to be a single focus in the room and the rest a "backdrop"?

Neither, see above. I have nothing against boldly colored walls. It is just not my taste.

"Are you too afraid that the darker colors would make the room feel too small? Or too jumbled?"

Definitely not too small or jumbled. At 5500 sq. ft. and 9 - 18 ft. ceilings throughout the house we could have done with bold colors without making the rooms feel small. We choose not to, it is just not our style.

C

Colors make me happy!

As a kid all we could have was white walls, I got yelled at everytime I tried to decorate or make a garden, one time I bought paint and painted my bathroom a dark blue, man I swear I almost got beat for that one!

So to me colors mean freedom! I can't stand white walls, unless the white is made to look like art work and everything in the room is white with touches of black or better yet balck and white.

I think most art looks too sterile on white walls, and too easy to "read" like type on a book, while I enjoy how easy it is to read black print on a white page sometimes I would rather see the whole picture.

Like a flower seen on a white background, or a flower seen with green leaves and other flowers.

I guess I understand for people who want their art to stand out, I think that's one of the reasons people like my house so much, art work is pretty objective to taste, and what I like maybe most people would not like, (tang horses and lots of koi items) but in every room there is a color or something people will flip over and in other more all white homes their is less to connect to.

Some people don't need color and can wear a gray suit all their lifes, nothing to dislike about a gray suit. I'm just more of a red power suit kind of gal :P

I love seeing color on the walls, I love this post! Love your guys homes also!

My house gets tons of compliments which is odd as we don't have anything really nice in it, just thrift store and hand me downs, plus deals off of ebay put together by some one who don't have a clue what there doing (ME!),

I posted pictures of my dining room on a chat a year ago, and it showed up in the Editors notes in a decorating magazine this month on things that caught her eye! I had no idea! My friends where like "I seen your house in a magazine!" I was like no way! I guess a lot of decorating sites where you post pictures they can use them. I would of never known my house was in a magazine if someone would of not told me. I got in touch with the Editor and she told me she just had to use my picture and they e-mailed me to see if I had any more pictures of my home but it must of not gone throw as she got no reply but she was very happy to grab my picture off the web and use it lol!

My dinning room and kitchen are red with yellow cabinets,
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My living room is OJ and blue.
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My hall way is same yellow as kitchen cabinets

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bath and bedroom are sage green.
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Callaloo, all of your colors are lovely. What color red is it in your dining room? This is what I want for my rec room! Thanks in advance.

Wow, those are some colorful colors posted on this thread.

I will be the more sedate responder to your question! I tend to do a color theme on each floor of my house. Right now the downstairs is on the gold tones.

LR/DR - Light Gold/Medium Gold with Oriental Blue accent.
Kitchen - Medium Gold with Paprika Accents
FR - Light gold/dark brown/Paprika Accents

Upstairs is shades of blue.

My house isn't big and I like to have 1 color consistent in each room, and then another color that makes the room feel unique.

Walking from room to room and having each room be a totally different, unrelated, uncoordinated color is not at all soothing or restful to me. I like to feel welcome and cozy in my house. Obviously, many people feel the complete opposite of me and their decorating choices reflect that. I do like color and colorful things, just not on my walls or in big pieces.

"Same color throughout the house, or different colors in every room?"

I can't show you pictures yet because we only moved in a few months ago and we're still accumulating rugs and furniture and suchlike things. Painting is probably a year away because the right-now list is long. I live in an old (late-Victorian with small amounts of Arts & Crafts influence) house where all of the rooms are very defined rather than open to one another and you betcha we're planning on different colors. I am a color FREAK and am very excited about having my little house full of rich, intense color, and that is period accurate for my house as well. It's one of the great things about having a compartmentalized house instead of an all-open-spaces one. Pastels and pale colors actually make me feel kind of depressed and washed-out! Each room, at least on the first floor where the public rooms are, is being interconnected by one or two accent colors with the next room - for instance, the living room is eggplant, gold, a little olive and a tiny bit of rose, while a tiny bit of the olive and the gold also shows up in the mostly burgundy and cream rug we bought for the adjoining kitchen/sitting room. On the other side of the living room is the entry/hall/stairway which we plan to do in deep blue, burgundy, and gold over-the-top "Victorian Hell" as DH calls it. LOL But there's no way that they'd all get a beige backdrop, it just doesn't work for the house!

Upstairs will be pretty disjointed, I admit it, because we're reusing things we brought from the last house and really love, and so we can even recycle paint colors from the previous house. The master bedroom stuff is cranberry and olive (will be C2 Cheetah - yeah, I like olive!), the guest room is yellow (C2 Limon), navy and white, and the library is going to be grayed lavender (BM Wet Concrete), something and something. ;-)

Oh, and I really, really dislike accent walls. :-) I also like white ceilings. DH and I have been discussing tin ceilings (real metal or faux) for the downstairs where the plaster ceilings are already pretty badly damaged and I think those look especially nice in white.

Are you too afraid that the darker colors would make the room feel too small? Or too jumbled?

I'm one of those people sort of immune to the whole "light colors make a small room look bigger and a dark room brighter" thing a lot of people trot out. (Some decorators insist that dark colors make walls appear to recede - for the same reason why black clothing is considered "slimming" - and thus make the room appear more spacious. Who knows. The illusions don't work for me.) So color has less to do with room size than with light levels AFAIC. I think pale colors often "blah out" in dimmer rooms and defeat the intended purpose, and intense color can look garish in a very bright room. I would rather put light colors in a bright room to enhance the sunniness and airiness and deeper colors in a darker one to evoke an intimate, denlike atmosphere.

"Jumble" is fine with me. It's also period appropriate for my architecture, too, which makes me doubly happy.

Callaloo - Yup, same wallaper in the bathroom. Grin. Had a couple of guys shake their heads when they saw it before it went up. They love it now. I also love your LR, it just makes me think of the Bahamas.

When we moved into our house 2 years ago, the first thing we did was to start picking paint colours to warm up the stark builder-white walls. We picked different colours for pretty much every room. The order of rooms we painted is interesting though:

Dining room/kitchen: brick red
Master bedroom: Deep eggplant
Master bath: Taupe
Foyer: Chinese blue, then lightened to a light gray-blue
Family room: Medium Gray-blue
2nd bath: Creamy yellow
Living room/hall: Creamy yellow
Powder/laundry room: Warm off white with black trim
Office: Pale blue
Guest room: Off white with hint of pink

Sense a trend here? The colours are getting lighter and lighter!

My favourite rooms in the house: the black and white laundry room and the almost-pink guest room :). The gray-blues are my next favourites.

DH and I both grew up in homes where colour beyond beige was not really used on the walls, and then lived in some all-white apartments, so we thought we were really craving deep, confident colour on our walls. Now I'm not so sure...

DH loves it, people who visit the house love it, but most of the inspiration pictures that I pull these days are of white or very light rooms. I'm not afraid of colour, but I'm developing more of a desire for the shades used in the house to be more similar to one another (they all coordinate right now, but the difference between yellow and red is not exactly subtle!) and for different spaces to be lighter or darker. We also have a lot of really interesting art and objects and we like colour and interesting textures in "stuff" (furniture, etc.), so it becomes a lot of different things vying for your attention.

I don't regret painting different colours everywhere, I don't think I could have come to this realization without having done that, but now I'm debating repainting a lot of it paler, more subtle shades. More "ambiance", less "pop" and a quieter, more nature-inspired, almost Shaker-ish or Ralph-Lauren-goes-to-Nantucket style.

Oh, and for the record, my house is not large - 1800 square feet or so.

liz1977, my DR is RL Burning Umber (from Home Depot).

dainaadele (spelled it right this time) -- too funny about the wallpaper! I've had it for about 10 years, and it's about the only thing in the house I haven't wanted to change yet (other than the coral room, because I can't think of anything I'd like better -- except for the color used in Mary's (Cameron Diaz's) living room in "There's Something About Mary"...).

My favorite "toy" is my SW fan deck.

Is there a support group for color junkies?

I end up with each room a different color. Some may be bold or some sedate, depending on the feeling I want to have in there, the light, the use, etc. We are still painting, but here are some finished/almost finished rooms (I've moved a lot of things around, these are mostly older pics). I like the whole room to be one color, including the ceiling. I didn't post pics of my hall which is a light gray-blue with hints of green and my guest bath which is SW Henna Shade, a lovely deep coral color. My living room is going to be a medium gray. I live in a semi-tropical climate, so I haven't used as many warm colors as I would usually. I would never have used any blues or grays in my old house, but they just look better down here!

I love color. When we were in the process of buying our first home, I told my husband I can't wait to start painting, each room is going to be a different color. He said no way! So we painted the whole house before we moved into it light light beige and ivory. I couldn't stand it, so depressing. Being that I am a pro photographer and artist, I love color in my life. So I slowly started painting when hubby was on his business trips. The first thing I did was paint the kitchen cabinets turquoise. He loved them. Now they are apple green and the walls are terra cotta. There isn't a room in the house that hasn't been painted a vibrant color. I get so many compliments on it, but people still say they couldn't do that, they're to afraid of color.

Our home has been builder beige since we moved in 9 years ago! Due to other priorities in my life, repainting the interior is just now happening. I love color, and it is as if the house has come alive! I am using the same color for my formal DR and kitchen, and the same color in my den and formal living, because I liked it so much, but different colors in other rooms! I will post some pics when I take some more. Everything is a real mess right now!

We have only a few colors for three reasons. 1) We have a very open floorplan and not very defined rooms, especially downstairs. 2) Adding extra colors would have been an upcharge for our new house. It's possible we will change some of them out later once we settle on the decor. 3) Monochromatic is my style. I'm not afraid of color, it's just not me.

Funny story about our neighbor who chose all her paint colors without consulting her husband. He freaked out when he saw them all up. Bright orange, Fuschia and lime green. They had a huge argument in the middle of the street. Ended up consulting a decorator and had to re-paint the entire house. Very costly. I think bold colors can look great when done right as we can all see from the lovely posts listed here!

After years of renting where the only brand and shade of paint I was allowed to use was Sears' tired Antique White, I desperately craved color!

Definately every room is a different color, ranging from sage green, warm light brown, Chinese red, and golden yellow. The part of the house that is mainly white (kitchen/bathroom/laundry) is not whitey white; I chose a shade called "Paperwhite" that has a touch of pale apricot that lends it warmth. Still, even those rooms have major sections of accent colors; coppery orange, and aqua. The kitchen will be the only room that is "white", only because I don't want the walls clashing with the Circus posters.

My house is pretty much like my garden; Binney & Smith Crayola crayons, spilled box of 64 version. :^)

I LOVE the feeling of different colors at different times.. I am one of those people that color certainly affects. I am having HUGE dilema's on Color. I also like different styles- In one room I want Victorian (a small hiding place that is feminine for friends, tea, wine, etc. or just me), I also like sort of Thomas Kincaid feel to the family room area.. wood with green or do I do blue (the new soft gray Swedish Blue-gorgeous), then there's Colonial, oh and the Irish/London look and of course I love the Glam look fo rthe bedroom or a Cool light Blue with White and then the Bathroom with huge windows and wood trim an outdoor green with ivy's and Iris Colors? OR Lavendar Pink and Gold? The Kitchen-UGGGH! the Kitchen, the Stairway? The Bathrooms Oh I am overwhelmed.. I Love Buttery yellow and white trim (which is the color of our home with a wraparound porch)

SEE??? I am MORE confused the more I think about it- I have put ANY color off for a YEAR!

Any ideas? Any suggestions on color, etc? I would Post Pics if Anyone would help.. I KNOW I have a creative bone in my body, but have lost so much with recent illness, and trauma's. I need my Style back and my Serenity.

I love color! I'm a color fanatic and definitely have a different color in every room. Each color makes me happy in different ways. I also have an accent wall, but not because I was afraid of painting the whole room that color -- more because I wanted to differentiate the dining area of our great room from the living area. Like another poster -- one of my favorite things is the Benjamin Moore fandeck. So sad! :-)

Dainaadelle:

Lovely home! But I do notice the similar great design elements that each of your rooms has -- and those elements "carry" the viewer's eye from room to room.

Sooooo -- while your rooms have wonderful different colors -- your style and decor is consistent throughout your home!

Just a thought -- love your home! :)