Christina Kittelstad is a tutor of QC Design School and an accomplished color consultant, home stager and painter whose work has been featured on HGTV’s show House Hunters. She is the owner and lead color consultant for Spiral Design Color Consulting. She’s best known for creating beautiful, functional spaces through the use of color and creating a sense of style and personality that’s as unique as each of her clients.
We all have them. Those rooms in our’s or our clients’ homes that are unorganized, messy, and even a disaster at times. I mean, let’s be real. With our social lives, families, hobbies, and careers, it’s impossible to keep every room sparkling clean all the time.
It’s definitely a challenge, but implementing a few organizational ideas to your home or your clients’, using color, will get things organized in no time!
Keep reading for tips on how to organize your (or your client’s) home using color!
Color and Organization Go Together
Some areas of the home tend to be more unorganized than others. Entryways, kitchens, living rooms, offices, closets, pantries… Not to mention children’s bedrooms and play areas and, of course, the infamous junk drawer. Usually, it’s rooms where multiple tasks and activities overlap that are the most cluttered and disorganized.
Home organization is one of the biggest areas of design where people go searching for professionals. As a professional color consultant, it’s super important to have a full arsenal of services at the ready. Color and home Organization go hand in hand. If your clients need additional services beyond color, such as home organization, you should be able to adapt your skills. Taking a professional organizing course allows you to gain the knowledge needed to best assist your clients.
Create a Mood
There are many benefits to using color when getting things organized. Working with color is fun, functional and efficient— not to mention design friendly! On a larger scale, organizing with color can evoke a mood in a specific space or an entire home.
For example, a business client may want their office to feel professional and energetic so they can concentrate on their tasks. Or maybe you have a private client who wants their home to feel colorful, creative and family-friendly? Do they want the master bedroom suite to feel like a relaxing, tranquil sanctuary they retire to at the end of the day or do they want it to be full of sunshine?
Each of these needs requires design choices, including color selection. By using color and color psychology to organize, spaces can be further defined according to a clients’ needs and desires.
Implement Color Systems
Some areas of the home lend themselves nicely to color systems when organizing. Here are a few areas where you can easily integrate color systems.
Kitchen
The kitchen is a perfect room to implement a color system. Color coding a meal planner or family activity calendar is one way to bring things together. But we’ve all seen the family calendars that have so much color coding that they become overwhelming and inefficient. The key is to keep things simple!
Organize a pantry by arranging items by category, then by color. This makes it easy for your clients to find the ingredients they need when they’re on a time crunch.
Office or desk
In the office, color coding files can save time and assist clients with finding what they need quickly. For example, use red filing folders for all things urgent and black for all projects completed.
Children’s bedroom
Color coding with children in bedroom and bathroom spaces can also work wonders for creating harmony. Everyone will know exactly what’s theirs by having all their bath towels, toy storage, bath caddies and more be of one color.
If a specific area or space has items that already have a ton of different colors, I recommend using clear or white storage containers. This will create a uniform look that won’t become overwhelming while also allowing you clients to see exactly what they have.
One of my favorite spaces to implement color is on bookshelves. Who doesn’t love seeing their books arranged by color! Go all out and arrange books in a rainbow color scheme—heaven!
Choose a Color Palette
When you need organize a variety of objects, choose a fun or favorite color palette that creates a specific mood. For example, in a craft room, choose a bright and cheerful color palette and pull it throughout the room. From storage to furnishings to supplies and even artwork. Use fun colored jars and storage boxes or paint a hutch a bold color. By keeping to the chosen color palette, a busy room will feel more cohesive and organized.
In extremely cluttered areas such as a kitchen junk drawer, stick to just one color. Remember, keep it simple!
In a corporate office that can feel boring and stressful, choose a fun color palette such as pink or teal to brighten things up and make work fun again.
Do What Works
Every space and every client will have different relationships with colors. Yellow may make you feel cheery and happy, but it could have a completely different association for your client. It’s important to find what works best for them.
Does red evoke a sense of creativity in their dining room or does red feel too bold or stressful, not allowing clients to relax while entertaining guests? Does blue evoke a wonderful sense of calm and restfulness in their bedroom? Or, does it feel cold and sterile? Does gray and white in the kitchen feel modern and efficient or does it feel boring and flat?
By learning your client’s color preferences, you will discover the best way to incorporate color into your professional organizer jobs. QC’s Color Consultant Course includes a color survey template to give to clients during color consultations. The survey allows them to discover their own color preferences. Some clients prefer a lot of color when organizing their homes, and other clients prefer a carefully chosen color palette. No matter what, discovering your client’s individual style and organizational needs is priceless when creating the perfectly tailored plan.
Do you know any creative ways to organize a home using color? Give us the scoop below!
Colour is so powerful. I’m excited to start this section in my Interior Decorators course I just started 🙂
I think this is a very good idea for me to try at home and even at work. When I start my business this will be a very good idea too. Learning your clients and what they like I do agree will help. Being organized will be less stress trying to find what you are looking for.