Every season is a great season for showing off your beautiful home. I think this is so very true in our desert. Now that we are getting past the high 100’s in temperature, we can take a step back, take a breath in, and marvel at the late summer sunrise and sunsets our city has to offer.
I was discussing the real estate theme for this month’s issue with our Editor just recently, and how designing your special place in the sky melded with the idea of buying or selling. Interesting enough, whenever you are in the market, either buying or selling, you want to present your home in its best light.
I love talking about color and how it transforms your home. The same is true for selling it.
The potential buyer enters your home with nothing on their mind, “Will my collection fit in this home, and will the color reflect what I would like to live in?”
Three years ago, my husband and I were looking for a new home. We must have gone in and out of several homes, before the realtor pulled my husband aside and said, “Carol isn’t spending much time looking at these places.”
My husband told him I knew my “Inventory” a quaint way to say my furnishings and accessories, and that I knew what colors suited me and my furnishings. If I walked in and immediately could not see this as fitting my needs, I would head back out the door. So, the realtor just started sending me listings from the area where we wanted to move that I could peruse from my computer, before we went out to see the home and it worked. He sent me one that immediately caught my eye. All the walls I would have torn down in the other places were gone, and huge wall was available to highlight my art collection and the colors were perfect.
A month later we closed on the home. When I had lifelong friends come over for a welcome to our new home dinner, they immediately asked me how I had remodeled the place so quickly to fit my needs.
So, color indeed is important either moving in or moving out. Now I think I have shared this with you before, but it’s worth repeating. The 80-20 rule. It is that 80% of the world’s population are warm color people and 20% are cool color people. Do you know which one you are? Do you look better in fall or spring colors? Do you look better in more dramatic bold colors? Are you comfortable with the color scheme of your home?
The thing is 80% of the population decorates in warm colors and typically I find clients who have lived in a home that they never liked…why? Because it was warm, and they were cool color people.
This brings us to the neutral colors that can provide an open pallet for those living in the home, selling or buying. A neutral color is exactly what it implies. It neither warms the space nor cools it. Black and white are good examples. They are referred to as non-colors. But with all the blacks and whites on the market, you will find warm whites and blue blacks. Take white and mix it with black and you come up with gray.
This is what has been a very popular option in the industry
for the past three years. Now where does the blue-gray color come from? Mixing a pure white with a blue-black. Voila, you have a cooler neutral color. Similarly, you can take a warm white and mix it with a black and get a warmer gray.
So, when the industry introduced a cool taupe in their furniture designs this year, it reflected the neutral pallet, but brought us out of the pure white zone. Are any of these colors new? No. They just have updated them, so we can feel fresh in our purchases.
You bought your home because you fell in love with the city views. Get excited by having your friends over for a late summer’s eve meal in a dining room that revolves around the season’s color pallet.
Change is in the air. Capture it with love, food and friends. You will find lots of colorful accessories just around the corner, at any of your favorite shops. Color in your accessories can take the neutral background and add your 80-20 rule to your home.
So, let’s grab this late summer by the colors of the season, and let’s get living!