Subtle yellow walls allow
for vibrant accent colors
to change in each room
of the house.

Introduction

Linking rooms with color may not seem very important if your rooms can be separated by closing doors. If you can see from one room into another, however, the color relationships between those rooms affect whether your living space feels smoothly harmonious or jarringly chopped up.

Using unrelated colors in adjoining rooms can make the house feel like a disjointed series of spaces, while colors that relate to each other draw the eye from one room to the next and create a pleasing flow.

Creating a Flow: In a house with an open floor plan or one in which rooms connect through wide openings, it's even more important to choose colors that relate to each other in a pleasing way. In this situation, the challenge is to give each space its own identity according to its function and still achieve a feeling of unity.