Tonal Colour schemes with darker colours.

April 22, 2026

April 2026

The question of including darker colours.

I often notice hesitation and wariness when darker colours come into the conversation about a room. Will it make the space feel smaller? Won’t the room be too dark to see properly? It’s interesting how firmly these ideas have settled, and just how little they are questioned.

The idea that a darker colour will make a room feel smaller isn’t without its roots. And while it’s true that lighter colours reflect more natural light around a room while deeper ones hold onto it, that alone doesn’t determine how a space feels.

Scale and placement shape our sense of a room. The most successful schemes I have seen are those that work with the space they have. When a room is pushed to become something it isn’t, you instantly feel uncomfortable in it.

Lighting is a crucial consideration, and I think there’s a nod to purpose here. If you’re someone who likes to sit and read, it’s worth asking when that happens. If you’re a morning reader, then it’s about where the natural light falls and where your chair sits in relation to that. If you’re more of a bedtime bookworm, then natural light becomes far less of a deciding factor.

When it comes to choosing darker colours (for that matter, any colour really) for your home it comes down to the kinds of colours you are naturally drawn to, how you want to feel in the room, and what you actually use it for. If you are drawn to darker colours like navy, olive or forest greens then read on.

Deeper tones, by their nature, tend to hold light rather than throw it back, and it’s this quality that can give them a boundaryless feel, a little like looking into the night sky.

With that in mind, they often work particularly well in the parts of a room that already feel a little more distant or tucked away. Around one or more corners of a fireplace, for example, where the wall naturally recesses. Or in an irregularly shaped room, the part furthest from where you might regularly sit.

Consider too the backs of bookshelves, where a deeper colour creates a backdrop that allows treasured book spines and ornaments to come forward. Used in this way, darker colours support what sits within the space, rather than competing with it. And the reason it works so well is because the natural light is often shadowy in recesses and so you all you are really doing is leaning into what is already there and defining it with a colour you love. Once you begin to see it this way, darker colours feel less like a risk, and more like a natural part of the room.

This month, I’ve chosen to look at two of the deeper Cotswold Hue colours, and how they might sit within a room. Pheasant is a dark blue with a hint of green, and Chedworth a deep red brown. Alongside both, I’ve used two paler tones, a lightweight beige Burford as a classic ceiling colour and beige Close Myrtle as a wall colour to show how they can be balanced by leaning into the features that are already there.

A deeper colour in the window recess, extends the eyline beyond the sofa.