Decorating your home should be an enjoyable process that frees your inner creativity while also expanding your understanding of style and trends. However many of us get bogged down in the fraught process of colour selection, especially when it comes to colour, and end up retreating to predictable choices on the false assumption that a safe palette will prove both practical and easy to live with. In fact the exact opposite results when we select colour merely on a safe basis. It is far easier to live with something you greatly enjoy, rather than merely tolerating your home environment and trying to live with it.

The trick of selecting colour begins before you pick up a colour palette. Before you confront the wall of colour chips at your local paint store or ever look at a book of fabric swatches, think in overall terms about who you are, what you are drawn to, and what kinds of rooms you most enjoy. What magazines do you always buy? Do you favour bright, airy modern spaces or rich, dark and cozy rooms? Are you drawn to traditional rooms or clean lined modern spaces? What is your favourite time of year? Do you crave rich colour and complicated patterns or soothing and neutral natural palettes? Determine what it is that you most love and are drawn to and take that knowledge with you in the selection of all your colours.

Build up a scrapbook with the colours, materials, fabrics and items that will work together to create the effect that you want in your home. When you see all of your selections together you begin to understand that a wood floor has pattern in its grain, texture in its finish and colour; a granite countertop is cool, hard, smooth and flecked. In practice, we dont dissociate these qualities, they all work together. All of this helps us understand why we are drawn and respond to specific colours, patterns and textures and not to others.

In Design, colour is the most subjective area in decoration and no amount of research will predict how two different people will respond to the same shade. At the same time, almost any generalization you can make about a particular colour can be overturned in practice. However, one truism holds true for everyone, all of us are instinctively drawn to specific families of colours which repeatedly pop up in clothes, treasured pictures or possessions, and of course on the reverse, there are colours which we will absolutely abhor.

It takes time to gain a sense of how colour behaves, like everything else; its a question of widening your visual horizons. Remember to ask yourself how you intend to use the room, what it looks like in the morning, at night, which features are worth emphasizing and which you want to play down, and of course celebrating your own personal pizzazz.