Warm Colors vs. Cool Colors in Home Design - Moving.com (2024)

Most of us are decorating our homes without a background in interior design to help us do it. And for that reason, it helps to have a basic understanding of the essentials underlying beautiful, balanced home interiors—including the interplay between warm colors vs. cool colors.

When it comes to choosing colors for your home’s walls, furniture, and decorating accents, the first rule, of course, is to choose colors that you love. But beyond that, there’s a real art to selecting colors, shades, tints, and variations that complement each other and work together as one instead of constantly fighting each other. We’ve talked color schemes on here before and the various theories behind color selection, but now we’re going to focus in on warm colors vs. cool colors and the role that they play individually and together to help you design a composed interior.

Warm Colors vs. Cool Colors: What’s the Difference?

When you look at the color wheel, you’ll see warm colors, cool colors, and a number of hybrid colors that straddle the line between the two, falling in one of the two camps depending on their specific shade or levels of saturation.

Warm colors: Red, yellow, orange, gold, beige, creamy neutrals, brown, tan.

Cool colors: Blue, dark green, gray, slate, deep purple.

Hybrid colors: Various shades of green and purple, depending on where they fall on the color wheel—i.e. closer to the warm side or closer to the cool side.

So aside from appearance, what separates warm colors vs. cool colors? It comes down to how they make you feel. Warm colors are vibrant, stimulating, and playful, while cool colors are tranquil, calming, and refreshing. In designing your home, it’s helpful to think of what rooms are intended for when choosing your colors—warm colors are often used in social areas, like kitchens and dining rooms, while cool colors are used in spaces for relaxation, such as bedrooms and bathrooms.

Where Do Black and White Fit In?

Missing from this breakdown of warm colors vs. cool colors are black and white, both of which are highly popular in interior decorating. So what’s the distinction?

Notably, black and white aren’t really colors, per se. To get scientific about it, color is a reflection of light and black is the absence of all these reflections while white is what you get when all of the reflections combine. On a less scientific note, however, both black and white can play key roles in helping you achieve warmth or coolness in a room—with white acting as a cool color and black acting as a warm one—but the tenets of design dictate that you balance them out with other colors, otherwise you end up with a room that’s a little too intense to be cozy.

Using Warm and Cool Colors in Home Design

Now that you know the differences between warm colors vs. cool colors, let’s talk application. Here are some quick tips for making both schools of color work in your home.

1. Balance it out
   

   The most important thing to keep in mind anytime you’re decorating an interior space is balance. And this is particularly true when it comes to color. Too many warm colors in a room can make it feel dull, while too many cool colors can make a room feel sterile. But balancing warm colors vs. cool colors doesn’t mean combining the two together half and half. Instead, use various shades, tints, and textures within either a warm or cool palette to add variation, and rely heavily on neutrals to round out the overall look and feel.

2. The 80/20 rule
   

   Speaking of neutrals, the general rule of thumb when it comes to using color in your home is to use color as an accent—not as the defining feature. To make that happen, it helps to follow the 80/20 rule, which is that 80% of a room is composed of neutrals and 20% is composed of richer colors. Following this rule helps ensure that you don’t accidentally overdo it while also taking a lot of the guesswork out of finding that all-important balance.

3. Consider the features you can’t change
   

   Unless you’re doing a complete home renovation, chances are that your interior design focus is on accents like furniture and wall paint. And because of that, you need to be careful to pay attention to the features that are already in a room and aren’t going anywhere, such as flooring. If you have yellow tile in the master bathroom, for example, you’re going to want to stick with warm colors, while blue carpeting in the dining room means you should stick with cool colors—even if you had other plans for the space.

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4. Do mix it up when it makes sense
   

   While the primary focal points of the room should remain within the same warm or cool color palette, it’s totally fine to use both warm colors and cool colors in a room so long as the alternating palette is used for accents. For example, warm brass hardware and fixtures can make a huge statement in cool colored bedrooms and bathrooms, while brushed nickel—a naturally cool neutral—looks great abutted against warm shades. Always think big picture when you’re choosing colors for a room, making selections that together bring out the ambiance you want.

5. Pay attention to room size and use
   

   Warm colors tend to be used in large rooms where family members spend time together, while cool colors are often relegated to smaller rooms. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it’s a good guideline to consider if you’re staring at an empty space and wondering where to start. When choosing between warm colors vs. cool colors in your home, always remember to think first and foremost about the purpose of the room and how color and size play off of each other (for instance, how cool colors can make small rooms seem larger). The more rooms you finish, the more rote this process should become.

Need some more interior design advice? Check out our articles on how to tell what does and doesn’t work in your home and the simple things you can do to make a house feel more like a home.