Good morning,
This week, I had two different journalists reach out to me, both asking exactly the same question: how do you choose the right accent colour?
It made me smile, because it’s one of those topics that sounds quite small on the surface, but in reality has the power to completely transform a room.
In fact, if you’ve ever looked around your home and thought, “I really like it… but something just isn’t quite clicking,” I’d be willing to bet it’s not your sofa, your wall colour or even your flooring that’s missing.
It’s probably an accent colour.
For decades, we’ve been taught what “good taste” is supposed to look like. Spaces that feel safe, considered, and above all, cohesive. Everything matching just enough, nothing stepping too far out of line, palettes that feel easy to live with but, at times, just a little too well-behaved.
And yet, when you think about the rooms that really stay with you, the ones you save, revisit, or try to recreate, it’s rarely that sense of perfect coordination that stands out. It’s the personality, the contrast, the slightly unexpected choice that catches your eye and gives the space its energy.
More often than not, that’s the work of an accent colour.
The 60–30–10 rule
When I’m designing a room, I almost always come back to a very simple structure, not because it’s rigid, but because it gives you just enough framework to be creative within it.
Roughly 60% of the room is your dominant colour. This is the backdrop that everything else sits against, from your walls and ceilings through to your larger surfaces.
30% is made up of your sub-dominant elements, the pieces that ground the space, like your sofa, your rug, your cabinetry or your bed.
And then there’s the final 10%, which is where things get interesting.
When a colour only needs to occupy a small portion of the room, that 10%, it suddenly gives you permission to choose something with a bit more personality. A colour you might have loved for years but never quite felt confident enough to use in a bigger way. It might have felt too bold for a sofa, too bright for kitchen cupboards, or simply too much to live with across four walls, but in smaller doses it can completely come into its own.
Finding your colour
What’s important here is where you start, and it’s not with Pinterest or paint charts or whatever happens to be trending at the moment.
The most successful accent colours are nearly always the ones that already mean something to you.
Sometimes that shows up in your home without you even realising it, a piece of artwork you’ve hung onto for years, a ceramic you always gravitate towards, or a detail in a cushion that you’ve subconsciously repeated.
Other times, it’s in what you wear: the colour you reach for on a day when you want to feel your best, the one that feels instinctively right and makes you feel good.
And often, it’s something you notice when you’re not really looking for it at all, when you’re sitting in a favourite café, walking through a beautifully designed hotel, or browsing a small shop and suddenly find your eye drawn to the same shade again and again.
The secret sauce
What I love about accent colours is that they don’t need to be loud to be effective, and in fact, they’re often at their best when they’re used with a lighter touch.
It might be a painted side table tucked into the corner of a room, a stripe woven through a curtain, or a lampshade, chair or piece of artwork that introduces just enough contrast to shift the whole feel of the space. These are the details that catch your eye without overwhelming it, creating that sense of balance between calm and character.
Which is why I tend to steer people away from the idea that everything needs to match.
For a long time, we’ve been encouraged to make interiors feel cohesive by keeping everything closely aligned, the rug echoing the sofa, the curtains picking up the cushions, every element sitting neatly within the same visual language.
But very often, that’s how rooms end up feeling a little too polished, a little too predictable, what Diana Vreeland so brilliantly described as “awfully good taste.”
What makes a space feel personal is usually the opposite: a small moment of contrast, something slightly unexpected, a detail that feels chosen rather than coordinated.
My favourite designer trick
One approach I come back to time and again is what I think of as a “red thread” running through a home, although in reality, it can be any colour at all.
In my own home, it happens to be blue, which appears in different ways from room to room: sometimes soft and calming, sometimes deeper and more grounding, and occasionally in a brighter, more playful tone. The shades shift, the materials change, and the context is always slightly different, but because they all sit within the same colour family, they create a quiet sense of continuity.
It’s not something you necessarily notice straight away, but it’s something you feel, and it’s often what makes a home feel cohesive without feeling overly designed.
So if you’re sitting there thinking your home feels almost right but not quite complete, I wouldn’t start by changing the big things.
Instead, I’d look to that final 10%, the layer where you have the most freedom to experiment, to introduce something a little more expressive, and to bring in a colour that feels genuinely yours.
Because very often, it’s not about adding more, but about adding something with just enough intention to shift the entire atmosphere of a room.
And that’s really where the art of an accent colour lies.
I’m going to sign off for a few weeks now to properly soak up the summer and spend some quality time with Zac and Sam. I hope you all have a beautiful summer too, whatever that looks like for you, and I’ll look forward to being back in your inbox towards the end of August.
Until next time,
Tash x