I’m ordering some couch covers and I have to pick the colors for all of them and I like the warmth of the beige and light brown ones but I keep coming back to this impression or intuition I have that light/bright colored stuff is sort of more “taxing” or less easy on the eyes than the darker albeit cooler colors.
Edit: My preference is towards darker and warmer colors/palettes but I use smart color lights that Im constantly changing so I wonder if beige couldnt be a warm mirror of the lighting palette I’ve deliberately chosen moment to moment.
@Lumidaub mentioned lack of coherence as being possibly more taxing which I hadnt considered but that seems very plausible so my thinking has evolved a little bit on that where I’m more open to the light beige as a possible mirror and affirming of whatever colors I’ve switched up the lights to at any given moment
The only other pieces in the living room where this is all going down are a black glass desk, black office chair, the TV, black water cooler, black dishwasher. Hmm, now that I write it all out, I’m wondering if the beige will be somewhat not coherent with everything else altho its actually going to be more akin to a chameleon in reflecting whatever the lighting is but its still not technicaly coherent in the sense that all those black things are absorbing the light/color rather than more or less faithfully reflecting it like the beige will essentially do
Funny enough, the couch is black too but I actually cant tolerate that because it will show all the cat hair and any dust or whatever probably so the covers are meant to also not overexaggerate stray factors like that
I would intuit that it’s less about what colour you choose but about coherence. Having a lot of very different colours creates visual noise which can be taxing. So you’d want to limit yourself to similar colours.
I wonder if because my lighting colors are so varied and dynamic it makes sense to consider the beige as a warmer mirror or palette reflecting my deliberately chosen lighting palette
Like, theres a sort of lateral coherence in that sense so it might be more nuanced than my initial thinking on it.
Excellent point about coherence, never really explicitly thought about it like that. Totally agree.
If all my existing stuff was white or lighter then a stray black thing sort of sticks out at the very least. Im starting to think that kinda rules out beige even tho it could interestingly reflect my chosen lighting palette/ambience
I usually tend towards black as a consequence of this intuition, actually been mostly consistent in that.
Having said that, I recently had to choose new bedding and bought red and it actually surprisingly works for me given my lighting choices so I think I could live with red. Just have to not constrain myself to the original prouct I thought I wanted to go with and widen my scope to find options like that.
I find red, especially darker reds very restful and easy on the eyes, in some ways better than black because its “warmer”. Ironically even more so than traditonally serene colors like blues which I love and I definitely wouldnt want the sky to be naturally red outside of sunsets for the most part altho I always loved places like Subrosia in the Zelda gameboy games, thought it was very chill
You’re don’t to get different answers because a lot of it is subjective.
But, my opinion is that dark is more “restful” up to a point. After that point, the darker colors end up giving a room a cramped, gloomy feel star can be less restful and more draggy.
That remains consistent for furniture, wall colors, and even in art by itself.
Beige is indeed a neutral, easy to work around color. As are soft grays. I’d tend to prefer soft grays, and maybe blue slate tones over beige with significant black furniture in the same room. Not that browns and blacks can’t work well together! They absolutely can (and holy shit I just noticed how weird that sentence would be out of context), but you need to commit to more of the browns, they need to be more present, like with rugs or whatever, supporting the black.
So, in my opinion (which is subjective as hell, as already mentioned), if you want a restful vibe, and are only considering a couch cover, go with something in the gray range, with or without tinges of a color to it. It’ll get the goal you have of brightening things a tad, while not clashing or looking out of place.
But! If you really like the beige/tan/brown vibe, it’s easy enough to grab a throw rug or some wall hangings that can tie the cover into the rest of the room very nicely.
Beige and brown are considered neutral colors, meaning they blend in nicely, and usually don’t clash, but rather support the other colors you want to use for decorating. They are warm neutrals, where black or grey (or white) are cooler neutrals. Other colors can be neutral if they are subtle and soft and don’t draw the eye.
I personally don’t think you need to worry too much about clashing with the TV and water cooler, but it might be worth considering what color the flooring is, or the walls. If they are a warm color (brown, beige, tan, or cream) a warm color couch cover would blend in better, and vise-versa if the walls and floor are cool colors.
Do you have any sheets or blankets that are similar colors that you can lay on the couch to see how it looks in the space? That’s might help too.
At the end of the day, you should choose what you like, since you’re the one living there, and you can always change your mind if it doesn’t end up looking the way you thought.
I don’t know how you’d measure that, but personally, I think that it’d be awfully annoying to be staring at all fluorescent colors all day long, so probably in some sense.
Thats sort of exactly what I’m impressionistically getting at. Like, my intuition just now that you’ve made the assist is it reflects light back at you as opposed to darker stuff absorbing more light
Not sure if its sweeping but I would qualify that as being more activating or stimulating in some sense.
Although I could be blowing it out of proportion because I dont use overhead lighting and I tend towards warmer, more saturated lighting colors so any brightness issue is sort of already inherently muted given the way I’ve configured all else
