Add a pastel pop to your living room with Furniture Village

If you’re unsure about using pastels in your home, this year is definitely the time to give them another go.

Outside, we’re slowly beginning to see the first signs of spring emerge, so why not take a leaf from nature’s book and follow suit with adding some touches of colour into your home.

Pastels don’t have to be all sugary sweet girly colours – by using them carefully, you can create contemporary, grown-up and stylish interior schemes that anyone will enjoy living with.

If you need a bit of inspiration on how to get pastels to work in your home, Furniture Village are on hand with a new lookbook. They’ve put together some lovely ideas on how to use pastels to maximum effect in your living room.

Grey might not be the first colour you think of when pastels are mentioned, but the experts at Furniture Village suggest it can actually work incredibly well as a base colour for adding additional pastel pops and we certainly agree.

In a living room for example, a large muted grey corner sofa can be brought to life by adding some select soft furnishings and accessories in pastel hues. Think dusky pink or pale blue cushions, ornaments or throws.

In order to create a cohesive and calming interior, it’s a good idea to keep your statement, or accent colours, to just one or two additional colours. That’s all you need to create just the right amount of interest without making the room feel too busy.

With Pantone’s Rose Quartz (pink) and Serenity (blue) Colours of the Year for 2016, there’s no shortage of soft furnishings and home accessories available in these two colours, making them perfect to use for a Pastel Pop scheme such as this. Both colours are inherently cool and calming, work well combined with a soft grey and are thus ideal for a living room scheme where you want to feel relaxed and at ease.

For the walls, you could choose a lighter shade of grey paint or perhaps some soft grey wallpaper.

Your accent pieces certainly don’t have to be plain. In fact,  it’s adds even more interest to mix things up and add patterned pieces too, such as cushions with funky prints.

Geometric designs are ever popular and can be a good contrast against the soft edges of a sofa and cushions. Look out for a nice geometric design rug, candle holders, art work or even furniture. The geometric style lines of the Conran balance coffee table, shown above, offer a good contrast in shape too, plus the natural wood tones in very well with dusky pink.

This coffee table design is oozing with sophistication and, thanks to the multitude of shelves and compartments, there’s plenty of room on it to display some more coordinating home accessories, along with your essential reading material and perhaps your TV controllers.

We love this colour scheme and think it’s a great way for pastel-phobics do start to re-embrace softer colours again. It’s not just a colour scheme suitable for a living room either. Pink and grey, or blue and grey, both work very well in a bedroom scheme, with soft grey bedding and pastel pops of pillows or cushions. It could be a good compromise colour scheme too, for those often hard-to-please males! It’s not too girly, but still gives some feminine touches.

If you fancy a colour change in your living room this year, then we’d definitely recommend exploring the options with grey. A few key pieces of furniture in grey, such as a sofa and chair, coupled with some pastel pops can transform the room and add a fresh feel for spring.

What do you think – could you live with this colour scheme in your home?

(Disclosure: This is a collaborative post)

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