Living Room Colour Schemes You Need to Try This Year

Red – erroneously thought to be brash – is a wonderful colour in a living room when tempered by earthy grey, cream and muddy blues. An Acapulco chair, tomato-red rug and mid-century modern coffee table sporting a wooden propeller base make for a hip living room heading into 2018.

Here’s the flipside of that previous image with the red Acapulco chair. The wall is painted in Benjamin Moore’s Caliente – the brand’s 2018 Colour of the Year. The deep rich hue has nostalgic resonance (hello, 1970s) against warm wood floors and a stone fireplace, but is uplifting thanks to the crisp white dining set. A perfect combo all around!

Do you dare? It’s just paint, after all, and the payoff is huge. This dramatic space could of course still work without the sofa, but it’s so much better with it.

You know those rooms that perfectly match? There’s the sofa, then maybe a couple of lounge chairs? Everything is uniform and well, to be honest, boring. We’re here to tell you that a green sofa (the deep-seated beauty shown here is Eve from EQ3, as are the other pieces) can co-exist with an orange tub chair and a brown one perfectly. Think of it as the united nations of furniture.

Behr’s Colour of the Year for 2018 In The Moment is this mellow blue-green. The grounding neutral has a restorative quality and works nicely with just about any hue on the colour wheel.

This is Kombucha, a delicious peachy hue, also from Behr’s 2018 palette. It joins new on-trend colours including the greyish, greenish Wabi-Sabi, the orange-peach Life Is Good and others you can read about here.

Heart Wood,

Dulux’s 2018 Colour of the Year, is a brownish-pink hue that is an absolute stunner. Not too cold, not too warm, it has the perfect tonal balance that pairs beautifully with cream, grey, blue or brown. Try it out.

Here’s Heart Wood doing its thang against a russet-brown hue. Can you believe this combo works so well together?