Color Decoded: A Living Room That Celebrates the Joy of Color

Design journalist Amy Moorea Wong is an expert on color – she even wrote a book about it. To help decode the secrets behind a successful palette, she picks her favorite schemes and breaks them down – with help from the interior designers themselves.

If using bold color in the home can be said to be a brave act, then the designer of this space deserves a medal. Call off the hunt — this is where the vividity has been hiding. Stimulating the senses, the living room is a high-intensity celebration of can’t-go-any-higher saturation. I feel partly like I need to find my sunglasses, partly like this is where the action’s at and partly like I’m having a lucid dream. I know I’m not bored.

Electricity pulses through the room — colorful living room ideas at their best. Lime green. Acid yellow. Neon blue, if there’s such a shade. You can practically hear the power vibrating through the air. “The palette was inspired by the bold colours and energy of Venice Beach – graffiti, rollerblades, sunsets, amusements,” its creator, Jessica Ayromloo, owner of LA-based interior design practice Ayromloo Design, explains. “It feels alive and happy.”

Grey living room with bright blue sofa, green rug and artwork, yellow coffee table and multicolor cushions

These tones work as a team, so there’s no one area that jumps out first. “It’s holistic; the colors are arranged to complement and speak to each other in a way that creates balance,” says Jessica Ayromloo. “There’s also a sense of harmony and relaxation within the vibrancy.” The heaviest hue in the room, the sofa’s solid chunk of blueness, is supported sandwich-style by a duo of greens, the shade continuing to ripple throughout the space in smaller bites. No color appears only once; they’re all tied together down to the thinnest of upholstery piping, the artwork neatly narrating the entire thing.

Shapes let color take the lead. Forms are oversized, almost cartoonishly so, adding to the sense of the surreal (as well as the practical comfort-factor). The giant sofa, artwork and table may function mainly as color-carriers, but their size makes the palette that bit more purposeful, extravagant and in-your-face. There are moments of delicacy and elegance – the poised table, the twisting pink centrepiece, their (intriguing) presence highlighting the contrast against the dramatic dominating dimensions.

There are several surprises tucked into the space. Firstly, the use of pastel color palettes, with pink and peach. Now they’re not in keeping with the power-palette. They catch us off guard and give our eyes somewhere to pause — with a double-take — to assess the situation, and then to get caught up in the alternate tones, when there’s been enough bouncing around the surrounding all-encompassing flamboyance.

There’s the silver base of the unadulteratedly lemon table, its reflections adding a new dimension to the room while standing out as a point of distinct non-color and bringing a more real, more adult and more grounded feel. And there’s the lush living room rug. At a textural extreme, this rug brings fluffiness into the land of the smooth, turning heads downwards as well as denoting a playful nudge in the ribs with its offbeat grassy-ness in perfectly manicured rows.

So for colors that go with gray, did you even notice the walls are gray? How hard that is to identify. It’s like the inner room is doing everything it can to stop you coming to this realisation, to hypnotise you away from its plain backdrop. It works. I can barely get my vision to hold on the surfaces — and why would I, when there’s so much excitement going on everywhere else? Apparently my brain now skips over gray like a design-led blind spot.

This living room is indisputable proof that paint isn’t the only way to express your vibrant nature in the home. It doesn’t need to involve walls and it certainly doesn’t need to follow any rules except for your own.