No other decorating component has more power and greater effect
than color. It can fill a space and make furnishings look fresh and new. Color can also show off fine architectural details
or downplay a room’s structural flaws. A particular color can make a cold room cozy, while another hue can cool down
a sunny cooker.
But finding the
color – the right color – isn’t easy.
The direction and intensity of the natural light greatly affects color. A room with a
window that faces trees will look different in summer, when warm white sunlight is filtered through the leaves, than in winter,
when the trees are bare and the color of natural light takes on a cool blue cast.
Time of the day affects
the color, too. Yellow walls that are pleasant and cheerful in the early morning can be stifling and blinding in the afternoons.
That’s because the afternoon sun is stronger that morning sun. When you are choosing a color for an interior, always
view it at different times of day, but especially during the hours in which you will inhabit the room.
Artificial light
affects color rendition as much as natural light that’s why we wouldn’t recommend you to choose and judge the
color in the typically chilly fluorescence of a hardwood store. The very same color chip will look completely different when
you bring it home, which is why it’s so important to test out a paint color in your own home. Most fluorescent light
is bluish and distorts colors. It depresses red and exaggerates green, for example. A romantic faded rose on your dining-room
walls will just wash out in the kitchen with a fluorescent light. Incandescent light, produced by the standard
bulbs is warm and slightly yellow. Halogen light, which comes from another newer type of incandescent bulb, is white and the
closest to natural sunlight. Of all three types of bulbs, halogen is truest in rendering color.
