apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

The Oppoponax left a comment that helped me track down the source of the office pic in my style tray. I knew I'd found it somewhere on AT, but it originally comes from DWR.

On to my next request for opinions: the office is supposed to be a "cool" room, but my husband and I really want an orange accent wall - so is the warm/cool rooms stuff a guideline, or something we should pay more attention to? Orange is his favourite colour (although I like it just fine too), he's the one who's got to work in there, and we'd be fitting the 80/20 rule just fine.

We've got some paint samples, so I'll pop some up later in the week for people to see, but what do you think in general?

I think it would depend exactly what you were going for.

I don't think it so much matters which colors you mix together. I've seen both orange and blue and orange and green work fine. But you can't really build a completely cool room and then just throw in some hot orange just for kicks. For instance, I once unthinkingly bought ice-blue pillows for my (very warm) couch, took one look, and realized it was WRONG. A strong turquoise or cerulean might have passed, and I ended up with bottle green ones. But ice blue was just too cold.

My best advice would be to look at photos with a lot of cool colors and strong orange accents that you like, and break down the components of the room. What, in the room, is orange? What other colors are there, and where do they show up? For instance something in your DWR catalog photo of the desk struck me as "cool", but when I looked back it was mainly the stark white (whites and greys usually read "cooler" to my eye than browns and creams, even though technically neutrals aren't part of the warm/cool thing) and the one green plant.

Maxwell's advice is most profound in the areas where the reader is stuck and/or clueless. That's why it's therapy. I wouldn't discard my own tastes to follow any of the guidelines he gives on color, but his advice is a useful sounding-board for thinking through why you want to do something different.

Bright, clear orange with clear, way-lightened-swimming-pool blue walls immediately strikes me as a good idea, but that's partly because I've seen those colors together in Czech art glass. You can do different intensities if both colors have the same clarity.

What I'd do is spend some time at a big fabric store collecting swatches of orange prints that you like. You're not required to use any of them in your room. You just want to nail down what color combinations please you. Take home swatches so you can see them in the room's actual light and so you can use them to match paint chips.