Go with the Flow

It seems that 40 years ago homes all had small rooms and each room had its own distinct personality, its own color, and its own design concept. Well then the big open concept home came into being. Lofts got hot and now we have to make sure the rooms flow. When you can see one room from the next it becomes very important that colors blend and patterns work together. It all sounds complicated, but it really isn’t and area rugs can make it rather easy.
Let’s start with a hypothetical great room that is attached to the kitchen. These rooms are separate but obviously they run together. There are walnut floors through out and we haven’t picked a paint color yet. We will start with this large motif (the room size can handle it) Lakes District rug from Milliken. There are plenty of great colors in it to work with and it will help ground the room.

Based on the colors in the rug, we’ll paint all the walls (common theme) of both rooms a warm camel color. This will make the rooms work together, but we will now have to add something to the kitchen to bring it into the fold.

We’ll use another Lakes District rug from Milliken, the motif is similar and the color pulls from the blue that was in the Great Room. You can start to see how this works. You start with a main palette and work off of it, pulling colors and motifs into each room. Making sure your rugs, paint and accessories blend and flow.

Let’s try one more. A master suite. You have the bedroom area and the master bath. The definitely need to look like the go with each other, that they are distinct but complementary. We have browns and blues in the main area of the house, how do we make this area feel like its own, but without making it feel like a completely different house?

We’ll take the walnut color of the floors and rugs and move it to the walls creating a dark warm retreat and pull the blue we’ve been using else where with this luscious wool rug from Momeni – it still has the over sized motif we’ve been using, but it looks quite different from the other rugs – the colors flow, but again are different. Into the bath room now – we can paint the walls here a pale blue (pulling from the color in the bedroom’s rug) and keep things flowing. A fluffy shag rug in the bathroom would complete the look.

See, it becomes very simple to make your home flow from room to room and still keep a distinct feel to each room, between area rugs, paint colors and accents it will be easy to create a home and a flow to your home.