Sheffield School of Interior Design Distance Education

Feng Shui Color

At first glance, choosing the colors for a room you're decorating, for yourself or for a client, seems like a fairly straightforward process of deciding what colors you or the client like, which tones go well together, and how you want to work around problems like small rooms, or a lack of natural light in a given space.

In the Sheffield Course in Interior Design, we teach you everything you need to know about using color: how to blend colors, what makes the difference between tone and shade, how to control a room's mood through color, and more.

But the art of practicing Feng Shui in interior design brings a whole new perspective to color, once you start learning about how color interplays with other factors in Feng Shui, such as the elements, the directions, and the bagua, or map of a room. And the more you know about how color works in terms of Feng Shui, the more you can bring this added dimension of design to your clients.

Feng Shui experts emphasize that above all, the room's owner should feel comfortable with the colors you choose; they should feel good when walking into the room, and whatever the room's function is should be enhanced by its colors. For example, you may love bright Chinese red, but you may find that if the walls of your bedroom are this color, you have trouble sleeping. So it all begins with your personal preference for the colors in question.

But then, you can bring some knowledge about Feng Shui to bear on the color choices you make.

One of the principals of Feng Shui is to that the world is made up of five elements — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — and to achieve harmony in a living space, you want to have the proper balance of those elements. Once you have an understanding of how you want to balance the elements in your home you can start finding ways to achieve balance — or to correct imbalances — by using color. For example, you may have a room that's in need of the wood element, which can be brought in with blues and greens.

To provide a quick fix for a room, you can try adding items that include the whole rainbow, and then see how that feels. This doesn't need to be a rainbow-patterned pillow or a photo of a rainbow: you could install a collection of vases in different colors on a bookshelf, or add a vaseful of fresh, multicolored flowers.

More specifically, of course each color has its own properties, and will help encourage a particular mood in a room. It's important when thinking about the colors to remember that you can have a variety of tones in any one color, and that each is distinctive and carries its own distinctive properties.

Let's take red as an example. According to Gina Lazenby, in The Feng Shui House Book, one of the books used for the Sheffield's Feng Shui Interior Design Course, red is a powerful color and needs to be treated as such. It's not enough to decide that you want more energy in a room and therefore paint the walls red. A little red will go a long way, and you may want to add just a splash of the color in a living room or other place where you expect people to congregate and where you want to encourage lively conversation.

But in a bedroom, red will work quite differently. Thinking of red as the color of fire and passion, you may at first think it's just right for improving your love life; however, as it increases a person's heart rate, red won't be conducive to a good night's sleep. And yet, a small bit of red in a bedroom could help add a little spice to one's romantic life.

Even though red isn't good for a bedroom, pink could be ideal — just toning down red by mixing in enough white will change the color's properties, and allow you to use it to more of an advantage. Pink acts as a sedative, Lazenby says. "It is a very loving color that dissipates anger and creates a supportive environment."

While pink is a good choice for convalescents (whether you're getting over a physical illness, an emotionally difficult time, or a relationship breakup), green is also naturally healing, and would also be a good choice for a bedroom.

If you want to encourage concentration, such as in a study or a living room where you plan on reading or working, yellow can be a good choice, as it focuses the mind with its gathering forces. Because of these gathering forces, it's also good for a room where people congregate, so if you have a room that serves as both a study and a living room, yellow is a good choice. If the yellow is of an intense shade, however, it may be hard to fully relax in the room, so you have to think about the balance between relaxation and concentration.

If you have a room that needs more water energy, try adding blue. Blue is a great color for bedrooms, as it fosters tranquility and will help even the worst insomniac to sleep. Again, you want to make sure that you feel good with the color; if you tend to have low energy, too much blue, even in the bedroom, could cause your energy to diminish even further, and again, you may need to balance it with other elements or the colors representative of other elements.

You can use color to offset an over-abundance of a certain element. For example, many offices have a lot of shiny metal furniture and accessories with hard edges, such as desks, filing cabinets, and computer equipment. Often the color in an office is white, which associated with the metal element, and all this combines to create an atmosphere of tension and rigidity. If you want to balance the room, you could bring in a red wool rug, which introduces the fire element.

As long as you're paying attention primarily to how a home's occupant feels about the use of color, you're heading in the right direction. By learning more about how Feng Shui can deepen the client's satisfaction with a room's décor, you'll be able to help the client make color choices that truly create an even more harmonious environment.

—Sarah Van Arsdale

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