📷Image Credit: Nepture / James Hare / Annie Sloan

Purple is seeing somewhat of a resurgence with interior designers and home brands exploring the various ways of using this versatile colour.

With a wide spectrum of hues ranging from deep aubergine and rich berry shades, through to soft lavender and lilac, purple offers great potential for creating a wide variety of interior looks from romantic and tranquil to bold and dramatic. Used as a dominant colour in a room it can make for an exciting and impactful scheme, but it also works well as an accent colour alongside other hues. Despite this, many find purple too bold or dramatic to pair with other colour combinations.

Choosing purple for your interior

Often associated with Royalty and luxury, and so a perfect tie up with this years coronation of King Charles III, purple can add real character to a room. Saturated shades of purple can envelop and add drama, particularly when teamed with the warm metallics of gold or copper. Dark purples on walls can be great for creating cosy living spaces as they help to create a cocooning feel but you can also use darker tones of purple in rooms that have lots of natural light.

Soft lilac, lavender and heather are perfect colour tones for relaxing spaces such as bedrooms and make a great backdrop for introducing other colours. By choosing a lighter shade the effect will be much less dominating and offer more opportunities to change the look. Lilac is feminine and restful but without contrasting elements it can look washed out so consider introducing stronger purple tones or contrasting colour accents for your accessories and soft furnishings to create depth and interest.

📷 Plain Chenille Curtains in Aubergine from McAlister Textiles

Use the colour wheel to refine your scheme

📷Image credit: James Hare

Finding the right complementary colours for the shade of purple you are working with will depend on the look and feel you want to create in the room.

"Complimentary and Contrasting colours are those that sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as purple and yellow, and using these together makes for much stronger and more powerful decorating schemes" 

'Harmonizing is when we blend similar colours and tones together, in particular using colours that lie next to each other on the colour wheel. As the name suggests, this creates harmonious and restful rooms,' 

Justyna Korczynska, senior designer at Crown Paints

For a bold eye catching scheme use deep purple with contrasting shades of ochre or yellow which are opposite purple on the colour wheel. For a more restful scheme select harmonious tones of lilac and lavender or combine these tones with neutral colours, pale blues and greens. 

Introduce Purple as an accent colour