How to style your home with black
Most of us have an idea in our head about how we’d like to style our homes - colours, fabrics, materials, and everything else that goes with it. While we know what we’d like, sometimes going about it can be more difficult than it first seems.
Styling your home with black has met mixed receptions in the past, but when used well it can very effective in your home. If you’re keen on black styling - or even still on the fence about it - we’ve put together some ideas and techniques that show that black isn’t a shade to be afraid of, but one to embrace in your home.
Black is one of the few colours that matches with basically everything. It is one of the most versatile colours you can come across, so either using it as a backdrop on the walls or using bright walls to contrast with black furnishings will work - as well as any other colour pairing you can think of! A way to keep a monochrome colour scheme interesting is to pair blacks, greys, and whites with differing textures - a feature of texture can be as exciting as a feature colour. Contrast soft-textured blacks against hard-textured blacks and match them together with something halfway in between. Any style - like industrial, contemporary, mid-century modern etc. - can incorporate black into the colour scheme, so whichever style your house leans towards can work just fine.
Over the years, many colours have come and gone from popularity - even black had a short stint in the unpopular books. The good thing is that it came back into fashion as quickly as it went, and it’s not looking to go back out again for a long while. If you like your home to be styled with timeless colours, then black is the way for you. Despite its short stay in the bad style books, black is a colour that doesn’t age, and can be updated easily with new furnishings or decorations.
A good way to place some black elements into a room is to choose black lighting. You’re likely to be putting a light fixture of some sort in every room, so a nice theme to run through your home is black lighting - this ties together your different rooms without having the styling too similar through the house. This works especially well in small spaces - with limited room for furnishings or decorations, combining the lighting and the black element saves precious space. Another idea to combine black styling with lighting is to place a bolder coloured light - like brass or copper metal, or a brightly coloured fixture - against a mostly black styled room. This will bring the eye to your light fixture if you want it to be the feature, and also shift focus to the other furnishings as well.
Warm metals - which are very in this season - match quite well with black. Gold, brass, bronze, and copper look great with either a black backdrop or with black accents. You can style with these colour combinations in many different ways, including lighting, decorative accents on tables, shelves, etc., in bigger furnishings like metal chairs, or even metallic paint for the walls! Timber and other woods also look great with black.
Dark hues make a room seem bigger as the borders and lines disappear, making the space seem boundless. Elements in the room stand out against the dark background, and the focus comes to the features in a room rather than the walls or borders of the room. If you’re not game to go the full black just yet, a dark grey, or navy blue can have the same effect in expanding the room.
The boldness of black is a big drawcard - if you have a space that feels a little shallow or flat, injecting some dramatic black into the room can lift it almost immediately. Using black alongside brighter colours really makes those colours pop and perform in a space. If the colour is the central focus in a room, black is the best shade to accompany as it falls away to show off the feature piece.
A good rule to remember is not to go too black across your whole home. Having a full black wall or walls in a statement room combined with other, smaller black elements injected into the rest of the house is better than trying to style too much of every room in black. Too much black can make it less of a statement and can become heavy or overwhelming overdone.
Black is so universal that it will match with whatever other colour scheme, style, or personality you’re going for in your home. When you’re stuck for ideas, turn to black to either enhance the styling in a space, or to complement the other features and make them shine.
