Lavender and Friends

Lavender has surprising décor power for a pastel hue and it plays nicely with others.

Lavender is working harder than ever in a variety of décor roles — from accent, to background to focal point color. It’s a hue I am drawn to so I always notice how it is used. When we first moved into our house I had the guest room painted lavender. I though it would be soothing but, on a heavily wooded lot like ours, it became a bit gloomy. Judging from the way the lavender fabric on the skirted table looks with pale blue, I should have made an adjustment. The blue-green paint in this Gustavian style room is Benjamin Moore’s Fantasy Blue #716 so anyone looking for a good partner for lavender need look no further. Just consider for a moment how the skirted table would look in white — to me that would disappear into the woodwork. Pink? That would pop. The lavender blends yet holds its own. In a way, it’s pink enough.

With mint color walls, a tone-on-tone green room feels very serene and classic. What’s fascinating is how the adjacent lavender room comes right through the door! It’s a background color but one that is framed by the white-painted woodwork. And that mint and lavender combination has a straight-from-the-herb garden freshness.

Blue violet and yellow green are close relatives of lavender and mint yet the effect of using them together feels much more modern in this room. That’s helped along, I think, by the cream colored walls and upholstery. Essentially the blue and green are used for a color focal point and accessories so they appear in relatively small areas rather than overall. The blue-violet painting is very well balanced by the color I call acid-green though it’s also chartreuse. The combination is edgier and more unexpected than the other two iterations, perhaps because the colors are more muted denizens of the color wheel.

(Source: designhouseofthehamptons, house&garden, decorpad)

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