The Year-round Music of Color

Sharing my thoughts on home decor which put me at odds with much of the trends

My colors on full display in my bedroom: the golden yellow was a revelation to me!

Now I find I must turn from the weighty matters of culture to something more light and probably far too female-centric: the question of color. I apologize to all my male readers in advance.

I love colors—so much that I have never been able to definitively choose a favorite color. My signature color was red since childhood—when asked to choose among four color options to pick a toothbrush, notebook, or game piece, I decided early on to always pick red, which made those kind of endless decisions easier. The reason I picked red was because my middle name is Elaine, so my initials were R.E.D. This made the choice easy.

I loved purple just as much, yet when I was a child, that was a rare option. Today purples from violet to eggplant recur in my wardrobe and occasionally my home decor. We had our main bathroom in my home painted violet-purple for years. It was festooned with thick white trim boards, so the dark hue made the white of the fixtures and tiles pop.

But I also developed in my teens an enduring love for forest green, and began an endless search for clothing in that color. That was the gateway to experimenting with all sorts of greens, from spring greens to saturated green-blue emerald, whose moment in the color world peaked in the early 2000s. The only greens I dislike are yellow-greens—meaning yellow with a greenish tint. There’s a reason unhealthy mucus is that color!

I was older when I discovered blue. After claiming to hate blue for years (the result of being forced to wear navy and light blue in Catholic grade school), I discovered teal—a rich and blended combination of deep green with blue and sometimes a hint of brown—I was swept away. I simply adored teal. And despite the sad state of society and fashion in general, I am delighted that in recent years it has made a comeback, which means I can buy all sorts of things in my ever-fave hue.

I love dark teal blue: the color of my mother-of-the-bride dress for my daughter’s wedding.

But there are other fun blues, of course. Who can resist the blues that enrich spring and summer? Robin’s egg blue, or sea-blue or that faded blue gray of denim that has seen too much sun—I even made my peace with navy when I finally admitted that it works well with my skin tone.

For a long time I actively disliked yellow. When I began to use it in my home, it was always reluctantly, and I tended to choose deep golds, or yellow tinted with lots of white. I don’t care for orange outside of nature, but the red-gold-tan of aged pine is a recurring love. Wood has color too, and all shades of brown from ash-gray to sunny pine make an appearance in my home.

Which makes me want to point out that colors shift in their meaning and emphasis depending on their context, specifically what they are paired with. This led me to an important insight into myself: I am seldom if ever satisfied with a single color. The monochrome scheme, the cornerstone of so much of today’s decorating advice—this means one color surrounded by neutrals like white or gray—leaves me cold. No, it’s not a single color: it’s a colors in context that makes my heart sing.

What does color have to do with culture, and recovering culture? I believe much. For one thing, our Father God colors the natural world in bright hues that in our area change with the season—the golden-greens of spring darken to the bluish-green of summer fescue—withering to a golden tan in fall and winter. And Mother Church offers us colors as well: purple, green, red, white, and of course blue for Our Lady. As the Atrium program teaches children to sing

Purple’s for preparation,
White is for celebration—
Green is ordinary time,
Red is for Pentecost!

I felt it important to work these seasonal colors into my homemaking because I have always felt it important that if we are meant to live differently as followers of Christ and to ask our children to live differently from the surrounding culture, it is wise to attach oneself to the liturgy, to live liturgically so that your home life connects with it naturally and intuitively. It’s what I’ve previously referred to as embededness.

So my concern with color began with the question of how to live liturgically, both for myself and my husband and for our children whom were were evangelizing through our parenting.

But choosing colors is often the choice thrust before the homemaker again and again and again. She must buy some needed implement, whether a can opener or a cell phone cover or a lamp—available in a dizzying array of colors. What should she pick? It’s like the same dilemma that faced me in kindergarten over my first Candyland game: what color? But writ much larger, to the point of paralysis.

Discovering Your Ideal Room

My “dream house” scrapbook, still a valuable resource for me today

Fortunately early in my homemaking days, I discovered Sandra Felton, blessed author of The Messie Manuals and founder of Messies Anonymous. She counseled to pick an ideal for your home—find a picture of a room in a magazine or online and use it as a springboard: a public room like the living room or kitchen is best to start with, since it should share your personality with the outside world. Analyze the image you’ve chosen and figure out what elements of that picture you find attractive. If you find other images similarly compelling, collect them and try to figure out what all of the rooms pictured have in common.

I’ve helped friends and family members do the same thing via another method: pick out five to ten items from your home that are your absolute favorites—whether they be furniture, photos, artwork, knickknacks, fabric swatches, whatever—the sort of things that, as Marie Kondo would say, give you a “spark of joy.” Analyze them and figure out what it is that they all share. Chances are they have some common elements—they may be the same materials: wood, metal, glass—or have common colors or color combinations. Or they may share a similar style—modern, country, sophisticated, rustic, and so on. From that, you can usually detect what sort of environment you want to build for yourself and your family.

I adore transferware, especially when it comes in more than one color! And that three of these colors are my foundation colors makes me love this saucer even more.

Following that path led me to whittle down the sort of colors and styles and things I enjoy to the things I absolutely love. I enjoy seeing some colors and materials in other people’s houses, but I would never want them for my own. For example, I enjoy wearing pink, especially fluffy pale textured things in knit or satin, but I would never paint a room pink.

From Sandra Felton’s one ideal picture, I started a scrapbook of rooms I loved (this was in the pre-Pinterest era). I would pick up free magazines from the library and page through them: when I saw an image that made me gasp with its loveliness, I cut it out. It was a bit of a book of dreams, and I still look through it to get ideas on anything from Christmas decor to what color to paint a wooden chair found by the side of the road.

When I began this journey, there was so little I could do with the house we were renting, and plus we (as always) were dependent on hand-me-downs and freebies for furniture: there was no room in the budget for a new couch or chair. So I set to do what was free: forming my taste. Taste can beat money every time. I read books on home decorating and magazine articles on quality furniture, china, ceramics, bedsprings, whatever I came across that related to home design. Always I picked up ideas and collated and analyzed. With my toddlers in tow I prowled antique stores and estate sales. This was my fun place, because my hobby was my home, and it became enjoyable to select and edit and discard one by one the awkward pieces that didn’t fit.

(This process was made easier as my toddlers amazingly grew into fantastic polite and informed shoppers. I recall how on vacation, I would troop into some cramped boutique with them and see the (usually elderly) storeowners wince as they saw a woman coming into their store with THREE KIDS. But my children were so good at looking and not touching, edging politely around fragile displays, and commenting enthusiastically on this or that piece for sale that before we left, the shop owners were invariably offering them lollipops and discounts on things they had admired.)

This analysis paid off recently when we had to redo our bedroom. After discovering that I could not repaint it blue and white since I had ordered blue carpeting for the room, I agonized over the choice for nearly 48 hours—and then I returned to my dreamhouse scrapbook. There I discovered that I had collected many photos of rooms with golden yellow walls. I thought I had hated yellow, but my subconscious—and my scrapbook—clearly showed otherwise. So we painted the bedroom yellow, and I love the color that I never thought I could stand. And it blends beautifully with the palette.

Polychromatic Decorating

After years of learning and shaping my home, I found I heartily disliked the decorating with neutrals-only which has been the base idea of so much fine decorating for at least the past decade. The reason for staying with white—or gray—or greige—or tan—or some other sterile color comes, I think, from an anxious desire to keep one’s options open, to never commit to a palette. Next year’s accent colors might totally clash with this year’s!—how terrible that one’s home should be off trend! But gray—sorry, beige—will match with anything. (In case you care—and I hope you don’t—the colors of the year for 2023 and 2024 were first a rather horrid magenta and this year a completely ugly peach fuzz. Expect to see a lot of this in Walmart and Target this coming year! Why we are still paying attention to this frenetic and pointless managerialism of our taste is beyond me…)

One of the books I stumbled upon in the library was a Laura Ashley home decorating book which walked the reader through the classic styles of decorating that have occurred and have reoccurred over the years. I learned what made a home Shaker style or French country versus English or American country. I also learned about Swedish Country, which was invented by ONE FAMILY! That last was a jolt of hope: Carl Larsson’s family had no money, so his inventive wife took to picking up old furniture and painting it, and he painted watercolors of her interior designs, thus creating a signature style that is still going strong today.

The palette here on this cover very much resembles mine.

Each of these styles is characterized by combinations of several colors: for example the golden yellows, rich cobalt blues, and sienna reddish browns that make up Mediterranean style, or the muted vegetable-dye hues of William Morris and the Craftsmen, or the vibrant deep and jewel tones of the Victorians whose cluttered and exuberant palette reflected the fact that chemical dyes finally made color affordable and available to the middle class. What makes up each of these traditional styles is not so much a single color but the colors that it is matched with.

And I began to understand why I was drawn to the robustness and intricacy of the Victorians but also the natural hues of the Craftsmen—both were highly chromatic schemes where color was not relegated to one hue found in throw pillows or a statement chair but were embedded deeply in the style. And thus I discovered that one reason I was always shaking my head no when faced with the “rules” of how to outfit a room was that the color scheme I was drawn to was, like those of the Victorians and Craftsmen, polychromatic: it was built around three foundational colors and everything tied into these.

My three colors were a rich deep red, dark green, and teal blue. The hues could shift slightly from warm to cool, varying over the years with what was available in the stores, but they have remained a constant hallmark of all my decorating. Everything else in the home has to blend with them, including wood tones, metals, and other materials.

This is not my picture, but it does kind of capture my palette, including the wood tones and the neutrals (ivory and a golden tan)

Because I have decided on these three color as my foundation, anything colored I buy or gather, from gallons of paint to throw pillows to sheets to plates to pots to outdoor furniture to picture frames has to go with this scheme. It has been a wonderfully peaceful way to move through these countless choices that confront the homemaker weekly and yearly: I know what matches and blends and what doesn’t. I’m committed to my colors, and that brings freedom to say no.

So I have discarded using any stain or furniture in cherry wood because it conflicts with the foundational red too much, and have grown to prefer a honey pine since it warm up the cool tones of the blue and green. Because of this RGB foundation, I soften stark whites and avoid super-saturated colors. My choice for metals became matte black, once we moved into the farmhouse we dubbed the Black Cat Inn after our family cat. "What color? Black for the Black Cat Inn” became our mantra when choosing plumbing fixtures, doorknobs, light switches, and other implements which had to be hardwired into our home as we renovated.

Today, after eighteen years of slow renovation, our home is mostly wood. We covered every available surface with real wood beadboard or wideboard or pieces of salvaged barn wood (way before that was cool). But I painted one wall of house siding red as an accent wall. And the blue? When we bought the house, the former owner had painted every single downstairs room a ivory white on top and—you’ll never guess—teal blue below the chair rail. So my favorite blue had reasserted itself into my life, and since we saw it as the fruit of prayers to Our Lady for this homestead, we have always kept at least one room that color of blue in her honor. I am typing in the office which keeps that color scheme.

But the best part of this color combination is that it overlaps with the liturgical, and here is where learning to pair colors is so helpful.

In ordinary time, I choose greens for table linens and the placemats I put on nearly every horizontal surface in our public rooms. These cover the scratches on the furniture nicely, and protect them from drinks and excess mess. In summer I match the green with blue and white elements which is such a nice cooling feel, especially with fresh flowers from the fields. For Fourth of July, I swap out the green for red and presto! Red, white and blue for a month when we typically have several parties, both patriotic and birthdays.

As summer eases into fall, the greens return together with the natural harvest hues of orange and golds, and when Advent comes, the purple mats are a more vibrant hue that matches gold more readily—although I stumbled upon red-and-purple placemats years ago that I love which work for both Advent and Christmas.

But Christmas brings in the red, and usually green as well. I keep the red going throughout January and February, which tend to be cold and dark months, so it’s warming to the interior. Once Lent begins, I introduce another purple—more cool and muted, more dusky than the royal purple of Advent. This works nicely with tiny spring flowers. For Easter I bring in the whites for lots of white, plus gold which brightens up the palette when it becomes primary.

And I feel that at least for me, the colors of the year give our home its own set of seasons that echo the year of the Church which echoes the natural year. And that gives a deep meaning to what might only seem to be the external. Part of our role as homemakers is to create what St. Josemaria Escriva habitually termed, “a bright cheerful Christian home,” because that is a way of showing hospitality to those who live there as well as to those who visit. Working the colors into our family home has definitely added to the cheerfulness, at least for me.

Thank you for reading! I know that many times, readers don’t comment on these posts, but I know from hearing from you that you enjoy them. I’m allowing anyone to comment on this post, both paid and free subscribers. I would love to ask: how have you used color in your own home? Was any of this helpful to you?

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