10 Color Combos You Never Thought Would Work

As a budding aesthete, I had the great misfortune of attending a high school whose team colors were blue and orange. It was bad enough seeing this rancid combination on the cheerleaders’ uniforms. But when some color-blind booster decided to paint the hallways blue and orange, it was the worst attack on education since the Scopes Trial.

Some color combinations just seem like they couldn’t possibly work. Blue and orange. Pink and blue. Pink and green. (Hell — pink and anything.) And yet … they can. As you’ll see in the photos that follow, it’s not so much the colors themselves, but the shades you use and how you combine them that make the difference. Even blue and orange can work together if you do it right.

It turns out there are no bad color combinations. Just color combinations done badly.

Blue and orange. Well, shut my mouth and call me Shirley. Here are my old school colors, in all their glory. Well, not exactly. The blue is a bit paler; the orange is a bit browner. Blue and brown work well together, so when you bring out those undertones in neighboring colors, it works.


Sure, the walls are blue and the furniture is orange. But notice the way the designer covered the floor and the bottom half of the wall in brown, so the chair has a much more orange-friendly backdrop. The orange and white curtains serve as a bridge between the two colors. Very clever!


Here’s another variation on orange and blue that works like gangbusters. The secret: The blue is demure and definitely plays second fiddle to the orange. To make odd color combinations work, try varying the intensities of each hue.


I think geography plays a part here, too. This color combination probably wouldn’t work well in Portland (Oregon or Maine), but in sunny Little Rock, Arkansas, you need colors that can stand up to the light. This pairing passes with flying … er … colors.


If you told me you wanted to decorate your room in orange and green, I would have said you were out of your mind. But here’s proof that even such seemingly incompatible colors can work together. It helps that the wallpaper and carpet are dappled with white, which acts as a bridge between the two hues.


Purple and green almost sounds like a joke, but as Monet demonstrated in his lily pad paintings (which the TV monitor alludes to here), the two hues can harmonize beautifully.


One of the delights of unexpected color combinations is that they are so, well, unexpected. How could you walk into this bedroom and not be surprised and intrigued?


Pink and blue always struck me as a combination best suited for nurseries when the parents didn’t want to know the sex of their baby in advance. But this pairing works beautifully. The blue is the most sublime pastel, and the pink (one of my least favorite colors) is pretty luscious, too. Pastels almost always work together, whatever the hue.


The blue is really grayed here, as is the pink, and pink and gray have always looked good together (a lucky thing if you lived through the 1950s). The lesson here: If you give two opposing colors a common grounding, they’ll look good together.


Not ready for blue and pink? How about blue and magenta? I don’t know which says more about the owner: the color combination or the leopard stilettos.


Coral and blue seems nearly as implausible a pairing. But if a color combination works in nature, as this deep-sea duo does, then chances are that you can make it work in your home.


Here’s a photo of LeBron James’ bedroom.

Just kidding!

This pretty pink and green space works because of the variety of pinks used. By varying the range from the barest powder-puff pink to an intense rosy red, you increase the chances it’ll harmonize with the green. And the stripe reads less pink than if it had been a solid field with a single hue.


Although I’ve said that strong color combinations often work when one color plays a subordinate role to the other, there are exceptions, like this plucky pair. With a bedroom like this, who needs an alarm clock?


Ditto. This bedroom is all the wake-up call you’d need, thanks to the pairing of orange and pink.


Resale be damned. Sometimes you have to do things because you want to. This shower would wake you up even when the water isn’t running.


When I look at this room, all I can think of is the statement by Trudy the Bag Lady in Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: “I was not always a bag lady, you know. I used to be a designer and creative consultant. For big companies! Who do you think thought up the color scheme for Howard Johnson’s? At the time no one was using orange and aqua in the same room together.”

And with good reason. But here the pairing succeeds because it’s used in a playful way, with alternating dabs of each shade relieved by fields of white, gray and natural wood.



With combinations like aqua and orange, a little can go a long way. This room has just enough of each to capture the tension between the two colors, without letting that dynamic overpower the space.


Brown and gray might sound like a good color combination if your decorating theme was, say, the Bataan Death March. But this pairing can look quite stunning and masculine. I bet LeBron would actually like this bedroom.


Is it me, or is it hot in here?

This brown and gray living room is downright sexy. Gray is one of the trickiest colors to work with, because it can slip pretty easily from dynamic to drab. You’ll want to make sure you’ve tried out your color samples in the room at various times of day before handing over your Visa card. But when it works, it’s subtle, sedate and sublimely confident.


Another yummy example of gray and brown. In this case the gray is very warm, with red in it, so it blends seamlessly with the brown.

Colors are like music. A flute and an oboe might sound like an odd match. But when you put them together, they harmonize beautifully.

Tell us: Have you tried any outrageous color combinations?

More: The Case for In-Between Colors

URL: 10 Color Combos You Never Thought Would Work http://www.decor-ideas.org/cases-view-id-22665.html