How To Match Wall Color With Floor Color 

When you’re building or renovating a home, one of the most important decisions you will make is the color of your walls. Stylish and beautiful rooms need to have complementary colors and this all starts with the colors of your walls and your floors.

How To Match Wall Color With Floor Color 

You need to make sure that you choose a wall color that matches your floor color. If these don’t match, it will upset the balance of your room and no amount of stylish furniture will be able to make your room look as good as it should.

In this article, we will look at how you can match your wall color with your floor color.

Identify Your Floor Color

It’s easier to match your wall color to your floor color than the other way around. It’s also more common to change a wall color than a floor color, so we will begin by assuming that you have a floor color already picked out or in place.

It doesn’t matter if your flooring is wood, carpet, or laminate, your first step is to identify its color. This means more than just looking at the dominant color of the floor as you need to identify the tones in your flooring.

It’s important to know if your floor has warm or cool tones as you can then use this as a base for your wall color.

Wooden floors with warm tones usually have undertones of red, orange, or yellow. Cool floors tend to have undertones of taupe, gray, or blue. Carpets are often solid colors with easy undertones to determine.

Laminates can be more complicated due to their patterns and color combinations so you will need to identify the dominant color and then use that for your undertone.

Now that you’ve identified the color of your floor, you can begin to search for the best wall color.

How To Match Wall Color With Floor Color

Here are our hints and tips to find the best wall color for your floor color.

Stay Within The Same Color Family

Colors are divided into families of similar colors. One of the easiest ways to ensure that your colors always match is to stick within the same family. As a general rule, warm colors go best with warm colors and cool colors go best with cool colors. 

If you have wooden or laminate floors, you will be able to emphasize and focus on the natural tones of these by matching the colors. 

This doesn’t mean that your colors have to be exactly the same. For example, floors with an undertone of red don’t only need red walls as they will look great when matched with walls of warm yellow.

A floor with a blue-gray undertone will look great when paired with a cool green wall.

Opt For A Contrast

If you prefer bold colors and want some contrast in your room, then this is possible as well. Instead of sticking with the color family, you can choose a contrasting but complementary color.

Color wheels are great for picking out colors and you can easily find one online or at your local home improvements store. These have the main color tones and shades organized by family but will also show contrasting colors.

Simply find the color of your flooring on the wheel and choose the color that is opposite it.

For example, floors with a yellow undertone can be contrasted with walls of violet. These colors will be a great contrast to each other but they will stay match and complement each other. 

Contrasting colors are especially important if you’re considering making an accent wall in your room. These are a single wall painted with a bold color that is intended to draw attention and are a very stylish addition to the home.

They’re commonly used in the living room but often appear in bedrooms and kitchens, too. We would recommend using a neutral color for the other walls and then picking a contrasting color for your accent wall.

How To Match Wall Color With Floor Color 

Stay Safe With Neutral Colors 

When in doubt, you can always opt for a neutral color for your walls. Neutral colors are versatile colors that will match any flooring color or type so they’re a safe choice that you can never go wrong with.

If you’re not sure about choosing a contrasting color or a color from the same family as we suggested in our previous points, then a neutral color will serve you well.

Beige, cream, and taupe walls will never look out of place and they will give you a neutral palette for the rest of your room.

Choose A Lighter Color Wall

In most cases, you will want to choose a wall color that is lighter than your floor color. We would recommend that your wall color is at least three shades lighter than your flooring.

There are exceptions to this, especially if you’re well-versed in color theory and know how to match colors yourself, but it is a good rule of thumb to stick with.

If your floor color is very light to begin with, then we would recommend using either white or light-colored neutrals for your walls.

You may not be able to get a full three shades lighter but you should try to avoid using the exact same shade so that there is still some layering and variation in your colors.

Final Thoughts

In this article, we looked at how to match your wall color with your floor color. The first step is to identify the color of your floor, its undertones, and its dominant color.

Once you know this, you can look for colors that match. The safest option is to go for a neutral wall color that is a few shades lighter than your floor or you can choose a color from the same color family.

If you’re feeling bold, opt for a contrasting but complementary color.

We hope that the information and hints in this article will help you pick the perfect wall color for your floors.

Joel Adams
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