YOUR FOUR-STEP PLAN

With so many options to choose from, Jane Rockett and Lucy St George advise taking the following steps to help you decide on the right colour for any space:

FIND YOUR PERSONAL PALETTE

Ask yourself a series of questions about your personal style: what colours do you like to wear and what colours make you feel happy?

CONSIDER THE ROOM IN QUESTION

Do you want to relax and be peaceful here? Choose soft colours such as pink and peach. Is the room you’re painting a place for work? Choose cooler tones such as blues and greens. For somewhere to entertain and have fun, think about brighter shades such as yellow or orange. The colours for a bedroom should be different to those you use in a kitchen. Think about daylight in the room, and when it gets the sun.

TAKE INSPIRATION

Don’t head straight for a paint chart, but look at your list and find out how each shade has been used in fashion, films and art: it’s easy to take inspiration from the candy hues of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, for example, or the saturated primary colours of a Hockney canvas. Look at Pinterest or Instagram, too, and decide on how light or dark, cool or warm you want each room to be.

GET BUSY

Testing colours is the key to success: paint sample pots on the back of old wallpaper swatches and pin them to the wall so you don’t have to paint over patches! Hang several swatches of the same paint, so you can see how the colour seems to alter in the light.