Warm Colors vs. Cool Colors in Home Design

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.

Balance it out

The 80/20 rule

Consider the features you can’t change

Do mix it up when it makes sense

Pay attention to room size and use

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.