How to Add Color to Your Neutral Living Room

This blog post about How to Add Color to a Neutral Living Room was last updated in January 2024.

Neutral living rooms get a bad rap. There are a lot of smart reasons to use neutral pieces in your space, but without the right colors and accents a neutral room can fall flat.

The good news is that if you have simple, well-made elements as your anchor pieces, you can easily inject color into a neutral living room and bring more personality to your space with these strategies:

Start with a Strong Foundation

It’s important to start off with a strong base. Pay attention to the proportion of your furniture and your layout. It’s crucial that these two elements are functioning properly before you make any color or decor changes to your living room.

1. Proportion and Scale

Your tape measure and a virtual room planner should be your best friend. If you don’t have a trained eye, correcting scale and proportion can be tricky: even the pros get it wrong sometimes. We recommend taping out furniture pieces on your living room floor or using a room planner tool to test your layout before putting it into practice.

Check out these decorating blogs for more great tips on Living Room Proportion and Scale:

• How to Space Furniture in a Room
• How to Layout a Room
• Small Living Room Layout Ideas to Make the Most of Your Space
• 15 Best Living Room Layout Tips

2. Focal Points in Around the Room

Every room needs several focal points. If you have a neutral living room that feels boring, color might not necessarily be the answer.

Consider adding drama with a statement light fixture, an over scaled wall piece, or shapely furniture. They might not be colorful, but they’ll make a statement in the room which is often where neutral living rooms are lacking.

In the living room above, notice how each of the furniture pieces have a strong silhouette. The wall art and mirror are also overscaled to the sofa so they create a strong focal point.

Check out these decorating blogs for more great tips on Adding Focal Points to a Living Room:

• How to Create a Focal Point in Any Room
• How to Decorate with Mirrors and Why We Love Them
• 10 Ways to Fill the Blank Wall Over Your Sofa

Add One Strong Piece

If you have a neutral living room but you’re interested in perking it up with color, it can be tricky to know where to start. One way is to make a big impact with a single statement. Here are three ways to do that.

1. A Bold Rug to Ground the Room

We love a patterned rug for many reasons. They energize a space with color and pattern, plus they’re stain-friendly, hiding any ‘oops’ moment in your busy family life.

One thing to consider when shopping for patterned rugs is that they often aren’t as bold once you bring in other elements. Because they’re horizontal and topped with furniture, you can choose something a bit bolder than you think will work.

2. Dramatic Art or Wall Decor

Wall art is any easy way to add color to your room, and we don’t always match art to a room exactly. In this living room, we used a a few different sizes of wall art to add both scale and color to an otherwise neutral room. Use this strategy in your own living room by incorporating artwork with color.

3. A Statement-Making Paint Color in a Neutral Living Room

Each of these rooms has a bold paint or wallpaper color that takes it to another level, and, if you’re looking for a quick way to totally transform a neutral living room, paint is your ticket.

Paint or wallpaper is an easy way to change a neutral living room, but it can be complicated too. Before you get started, ask yourself a few questions about how you want your space to feel.

1. What do you want the energy to be?
2. How much light does the room get?
3. What time of day are you using the room?

These questions can help you narrow down a color before heading to the paint store. Of course the number one rule of painting is to test your paint with swatches!

Check out these decorating blogs for more great tips on Paint Color:

• How to Pick the Right Paint Color
• How to Use a Color Wheel in Decorating
• Podcast: Picking Paint with Fran Keenan
• Find inspiration with all of the paint colors from our catalogs

Small Accents that Add Up in a Neutral Living Room

If you want to make a change but don’t want to commit to anything major, consider bringing in lots of small accents that give your room a color makeover.

In the living room above, we’ve added lots of small accents of blue—pillows on the couch, lampshades, and trim on the curtains. Pull small items from other areas of your home and use them all in the same space to make a big impact.

1. Add Plants to your Neutral Living Room

If you have a green thumb, consider grouping lots of plants together to inject energy into a neutral living room. We love the way potted houseplants add color to this living room.

2. Matching Drapes and Pillows

One fabric used in several ways can totally transform a neutral living room. In the space above, we matched the colors and patterns of the drapery on the sofa’s throw pillows. Easy and effective.

Using one large print over and over again may seem busy and over the top, but it actually has a calming effect. Because it’s repeated, it feels like a neutral here.

3. An Accent Chair and Pillows

If you look at the bones of the room above, they’re pretty simple. Two matching accent chairs and contrasting pillows with bold florals totally transform the space.

Layer with Purpose in a Neutral Living Room

Once you’ve added a few colors into your neutral living room, we bet you’ll start looking for other ways to layer color into your space. With thoughtful choices, your neutral space can grow and change with you.

1. Start with a Unifying Fabric or Rug

In each of the space above, we started with an animal print rug that drove the color palette of the room, but if you look carefully there are lots of neutral pieces incorporated to each space. As you’re layering elements into your room, find something to unify all of your choices like a rug or fabric.

2. Grow Your Neutral Room over Time

No room in your house should stay stagnant for years. Small tweaks and changes may not change the foundation of the space, but they’ll keep your living room from looking stale or dated.

Looking for more living room inspiration? Read these helpful articles next:

• Small Ways to Add Color to Your Room
• Living Room Lighting: How to Layer More Lighting into Your Space
• 15 Best Living Room Layout Tips
• Small Living Room Ideas to Make the Most of Your Space

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