More people every year are renting and buying furniture to spruce up their homes. Interior decorating is everyone’s favorite part-time hobby and home investment. It doesn’t take a professional to recognize great design, but it does require a bit of inspiration and a solid grasp of color theory.
For example, buying a bright colored couch can seem like an awesome idea at first, but making it fit your space is another thing. A vibrant loveseat, sectional, or leather couch has so much potential and character. It’s all a matter of how you present it and compliment it with the rest of your living space.
This guide should help you get some ideas going and plan for how you want to approach the rest of your decorating.
Find Your Style
Being stylish is more than just finding big pieces and putting them together in the same room. When you add an accent piece like a bright colored couch, you begin to play with light and color. This is different than picking out matching living room and dining room sets.
Are you aiming more for a specific style, such as modern, natural, luxurious, antique, ethnic, or exotic? Well, you can still achieve this theme, even with a bright couch in the middle of it. You will need to decide on how you will accessorize, compliment, and define your theme.
Textures, lighting, and complimentary colors are key to finding and defining your style.
Large Furnishings
These large pieces of furniture need to be discovered before moving onto accessories. You already got the couch, now you just need some chairs, tables, shelving, and large decorative pieces to continue the theme. Ideally, you want these large pieces to be the same color or in the same section on the color wheel.
Use a color calculator to help with finding your color scheme. These large accent pieces should work together to make the color of the room pop. It is important to avoid crowding the space physically or you’ll end up with a room that is much too busy. Yogibo furniture are perfect for compact, comfortable, and stylish accent furniture.
Accessorize Small
Accessories should fill in the gaps with colors that are either neutral or secondary to your bright colored couch. Muted tones and territory colors work perfectly with bright accent pieces. These accessories can be prints on the wall, lamps, pillows, throws, rugs, or even electronics.
It’s all going to come back to what you want to define as your style. Where you place these accessories will also be important for creating good movement. Without strong accessories, a nice, bright couch surrounded by similarly-toned furniture will end up feeling lifeless. Think the dentist’s or corporate lobby.
You don’t want to waste all that great color work with a dull and unengaging background. Be like Bob Ross and fill up those crevices and corners with interesting details, but don’t overdo it.
Reviving Old Pieces
Lastly, when considering your decorating goals, don’t overlook what you already have. If you already have some furniture with personality, but not the right color, consider reupholstering/repainting. Not only is this cost-efficient, but it’s smart.
You can pick the exact color you want your accent pieces to be and save yourself a lot of time hunting for new ones. Availability of accent colors depends on trending fashions. This is why furniture stores are constantly trying to move seasonal furniture, because they go out of style.
Your style is whatever you want it to be and it will work as long as you have a cohesive theme.
Ideas for a Bright Colored Couch
For more inspiration, let’s look at some examples of modern living room themes.
Textured White/Off-White
Let’s start with the basics of simple, effective interior design. A textured white canvas is the perfect way to showcase a brightly colored couch. It doesn’t matter what your living room furniture color is, as long as it isn’t a very light shade.
Rich, vibrant colors come alive and accessories easily take on their own life in a textured white or off-white background.
Ornate and Sculptured
There’s nothing cooler than a modern, artistic home with unique furniture and accessories. By utilizing ornate designs and unique sculptures, your accent pieces provide the backdrop. This can potentially save you the trouble of having to repaint all your walls to compliment your style.
When you have visually-engaging accessories and statement pieces, such as political art, futuristic tech, or antiques, your home becomes iconic. For those who are looking for their home to be noticed, this is a winning formula.
Wood and Natural Accents
Earthy tones make great vessels for bright colors. Incorporate some hardwood floors, hand-crafted furniture, and bamboo accessories. Wood allows for more creativity without sacrificing comfort.
It is important to find a balance between bright accent colors and wooden accents. Space should be accounted for, as well as the quantity of each type of furniture.
Bold and Luxurious
High-end luxury condos often toe the line between minimalism and exotic materials. Your bright furniture pieces can offer a focal point for a luxurious and chic design. With this category, special attention needs to be paid to materials.
For metals, you can use highlights of gold with brass or steel furnishings. For fabrics, layer in some cashmere, silk, or velvet with cotton, polyester, and hemp. You read that right, hemp is a very trendy material for those looking for more bohemian or oriental styles.
Masculine Modern Design
Masculine interior designs are a pretty broad cross-section to cover. You have your more extreme, often tacky, “man caves”. You also have modernistic, warmer, interiors that incorporate lots of metals and textures. We prefer a combination of these elements, mixed in with some natural accents.
If you’re going to sit a bold, bright couch in a living room with these elements, you’ll need to think about textures. For example, your coffee table should be glass, metal, plastic, but never just standard wood. It is such an integral piece, it shouldn’t be a standard, neutral texture.
Balance, tasteful, and subtle pieces are vital to designing non-tacky masculine spaces.
Avant-Garde
Bright colored anything can become the perfect avant-garde centerpiece. Retro is in, and so is expressive living rooms. You can say a lot and still avoid ‘tackiness’, so don’t assume that avant-garde design needs to be haphazard.
We prefer going with large mirrors, paintings, windows, and rugs. These are typically what sets the tone for an avant-garde living room.
Spiritual Design
A spiritual living space can be personal, communal, or purely decorative. You can transform your living room into something that feels spiritual without saying it. Utilizing crystals, stones, and plants can build a very spiritual environment.
Large amethyst geodes, quartz coffee tables, water fountains, and aromatic herbs can really set the tone. We recommend going to crystal and rock suppliers and getting your spiritual supplies wholesale. Most interior design companies and furniture stores aren’t going to offer much for this type of style.
Try to avoid hokey stuff like dreamcatchers, Hindu statues, and rosary beads, unless that is part of your own identity. The only exceptions to this would be large commissioned artwork. Keep statues to a minimum to avoid feeling cluttered.
Monochromatic
Is that couch your absolute favorite color in the world? Well, there is a way to feasibly achieve a monochromatic interior without looking boring. This look will provide a very sophisticated and stylish spin on a brightly colored couch.
You’ll need a strong vision of how you will distribute the different shades of color, while balancing it with grays, blacks, and whites. If done correctly, the room should gently transition like a gradient. If you vary your colors using tone, shades, and tints, you keep your color scheme from becoming dull.
Using one color isn’t a strict rule in interior design; browns, tans, and complimentary colors can be peppered without throwing off the theme.
California Casual
This last category of interior design can also be called “Floridian”, “tropical”, or just casual beach design. Bright furniture goes perfectly with these styles. High-end travel resorts often do a really good job at executing this look.
You take your bright colored furniture, add in some neutral shelves, tables, and lamps. Next, focus on keeping spaces airy and free-flowing. Remove large wooden end tables, bulky armoires, and things of that nature.
Adding a basic ceiling fan isn’t required, but it definitely encapsulates the theme of breezy, casual, unbothered life.
More Modern Style Ideas
We hope you liked our tour of interior design around a bright colored couch. We know what it’s like to find a piece of furniture that just screams “Buy me!” The energy just feels right with a fresh new splash of color.
Remember to think outside the box with your interior design. Is it cohesive and does it compliment the outside? Will it be easy to maintain and clean? These things are often overlooked, but they could matter with your lifestyle.
If you’re looking for more ideas and inspiration for the home, we have plenty more where this came from. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it certainly made a better human.
