The easiest way to achieve the perfectly coordinated home is to begin with a color key.  Designers use a color key all the time, naming it a “key fabric” or “key piece” as a way of establishing a color scheme and continuity.  I like to call it the road map or should I update this to navigation system?  Knowing where to go can help remove the fear from making bad color choices.

Color Key: This is your color road map for interior success. An object used as the basis for your color scheme for a room or home. It may be a piece of fabric, artwork, or a rug. Colors which appear in your color key are selected for areas in fabrics, surfaces, artwork and furnishings. Each color used in the room or home needs to appear in or coordinate with this piece.  Wall and paint colors are chosen from this color key not the other way around.

Success Factor:  The color key is selected first before any room color or furniture color!

Using a color key keeps you from making haphazard selections and from creating “visual vomit” with poorly chosen colors.  A beautiful color scheme makes a space comfortable to all who enter, regardless of whether or not they like a particular color.  A color key provides the reason for the visual relationships of color in an interior.  Each room has a color key which is not to say adjoining rooms may not share the same color key.  However if they do not the color keys still share some form of color continuity.

Here are some color keys (key fabrics) with their additional color selections.

Living Room Color Key - Brunschwig and Fils Fabric

Additional fabrics and finishes selected to coordinate with color key.

A large living room in a traditionally styled home with multiple seating areas required options for many different fabrics.  Some of the fabrics shown were used in an adjoining breakfast area and passage.

For my own media room (1st picture), I had to have this fabric by Osborne and Little.  Couldn’t live without it – so I built an entire room around it.

But with such a large pattern requires using very little to allow the room to remain calm rather than a screaming sea of pink and green.

I often use this room to further illustrate the concept of not having to “love” everything.  Truth: I hate taupe.  But this room required an appropriate background to balance the vibrant pinks and greens and to allow it to be the feature or “star.”  Plus as a media room it needed to be dark, but not heavy.  So the walls (Wolf Gordon wallcovering), ceiling (paint), window treatment (Fadini Borghi silk and metal fabric), upholstery (mohair and leather) and floor (wool carpet) were all this same color of taupe.

A color key provides the boundaries for a room or space.  Consider it a guide.  Just like when driving one needs to follow the road to get to the destination.  One should follow their color key when adding elements to a room.  Using a color key is your flawless solution for the perfect color scheme.