The Best Color Palette For A Shabby Chic Home Decor Style

Shabby chic is a fantastic style to build a home around. It is timeless, cozy, and relatively easy to create. Moreover, it always leads to a space that feels inviting and makes people want to return again and again. So what is this style exactly? Shabby chic utilizes rustic and vintage pieces and complements them with bright and airy spaces. This combination of materials results in a home that has character but is ultimately clean and modern in configuration.

Light and bright is the name of the game here, so the main focus is on a warm white. Not a cool, sterile, or shiny white, but a warm white that is flawed and textured to give it that lived-in quality. Modern Mrs Darcy notes that when this color is not properly accented or is the wrong tone, it can make a space feel cold and unwelcoming, and you want to avoid that. To create the ideal shabby chic style, this warm white should be found on walls and doors, as well as cabinets, side tables, and other décors.

Besides white, the shabby chic home décor style uses plenty of beige tones. This hue is a soothing color to the eye and is applied similarly to a warm minimalist interior. Decor Outdoor notes that because a lot of shabby chic styling is pairing white and worn materials together, it is important to have this clean neutral as a low-contrast color to keep things looking neat and clean. It is this balance of the old and new that makes this décor style work. And unlike in a warm minimalist room, the beige shade becomes all the more noticeable when working with more traditional furniture silhouettes.

Carpets, sofas, throw pillows, chairs, chair cushions, and hardwood floors (in oak tones) — you can have more than one neutral tint, as long as they are all organized and thoughtfully presented in your home. Finally, beige pairs well with so many other colors, such as navy and rust tones, which is why the neutral shade really is the central nervous system of the shabby chic décor.

Lastly, the third shade in your shabby chic palette to focus on is brown or black. This choice leads to one of two different outcomes. The brown tone, which may essentially just mean more variations of the beige shade reigning all over the place, will give the home more of a warm and soft sensibility. The hue might show itself in pillow patterns, rug designs, art pieces, and other finer details.

However, black will add an edge and sophistication to the house that really emphasizes the chic (as noted by HappyHauteHome). Black works wonderfully with a similar placement as brown; however, it can be quite striking on kitchen cabinets, fireplaces, accent walls, and other areas, giving the room a slightly contemporary edge. This base palette of white, beige, and black or brown is the exciting baseline. From there, combining the scheme with antique textures, welcomed imperfections, and traditional silhouettes will complete the look.