Guest room retreat
During the holiday season, spare rooms everywhere fill up with friends and family. Resene shows us how to keep those guests coming back with a beautiful, cohesive space.
If there is one room in the house that always seems to be the last to feel the decorating love, it’s the spare room. Choosing paint colours for a guest bedroom can be a great opportunity to experiment and have a bit of fun. By starting with a flexible base palette, simple white bed linen and a couple of extra throws, cushions and accessories, you could even customise the space for each of your guests that regularly come to visit.
The key to a flexible base palette lies in picking character neutrals to use on your walls, floor and ceiling. These hues get their name from their complex undertones, which act like chameleons. Resene Rakaia and its various strength levels is among them. Depending on the accent colours that you pair with it, Resene Rakaia can instantly be made to feel warmer or cooler and appear to look like an entirely different hue. This urban shale grey is also ideal for use in a bedroom for its inherently soothing and restful nature that is very easy on the eyes.
This guest bedroom, which features walls in full strength Resene Rakaia and a floor in Resene Quarter Rakaia relies on other character neutrals – Resene Shark on the headboard and bench and Resene Santas Grey on the bedside table. These colours play to the cooler side of Resene Rakaia and, thanks to their own violet undertones, seem to bring out a touch of violet in it, too.
From here, the colours you could use to finish off the space are limited only by your imagination. One idea is to start by picking out some accessories you love, like a statement throw or a charming cushion. You can bring these items to your local Resene ColorShop, and the staff there can help you find colours to match or coordinate. We colour matched a pink pillowcase and a yellow velvet cushion and painted a handful of small accessories in Resene Wax Flower and Resene Chenin.
For a different look, try swapping in some earthy greens like Resene Siam and Resene Raptor. Or try some periwinkle accessories in Resene Zephyr and Resene Alaska. Whatever accent hues you choose, just be sure to use each one in three different places in your room. This will help create a natural sense of repetition and communicate to the perceiver that they’re looking at a cohesive colour palette that welcomes them to settle in and stay awhile.
Background in Resene Quarter Rakaia with A4 drawdown paint swatches in (from top to bottom) Resene Shark, Resene Jimmy Dean, Resene Santas Grey, Resene Rakaia, Resene Wax Flower and Resene Chenin, book and bird in Resene Wax Flower and bud vase in Resene Chenin.
