I’ve always kept my love of interiors quite close to my chest. As a student, I was skint and dreaming of fine art and beautiful furniture seemed years if not decades away. I spend a lot of time on Pinterest scrolling and my new obsession is grey and navy living and dining rooms.
I’m really enjoying documenting our interior decorating journey. It will become even more exciting once we buy our house, but for now, as renters we are only allowed to do so much. Our downstairs is made up of 3 rooms. A hallway from the front door leads to the kitchen and our living room and dining room is one large room separated by an arch.
When I first moved into the house, the living room and dining room were painted white with a dark grey carpet. The chimney breast had a black wallpaper on it and it wasn’t my style. I don’t mind the wallpaper pattern so much, but I really don’t like the idea of having black walls. Black doors however, are something I REALLY like. Simply because our dog pushes all the doors open himself and the doors that are white are always covered in mud on the bottom third.
So I got on Pinterest and looked for colour schemes and designs that had grey in them. I kept coming back to grey with touches of navy. There is something so smart about navy blue. The depth of the colour is just really pleasing to me. So I decided I was going to look to bring strong blue hues in particular, navy, through accessories in the rooms. So i’m currently on the hunt for navy accessories like cushions, art prints, vases etc.
We knew we wanted grey as our main colour, simply because it was the one colour that we had tins of paint leftover that we didn’t want to waste and grey goes with everything. After browsing Pinterest and seeing so many beautiful homes with navy, like Lydia Millens old living room, I was sold on the idea of incorporating navy blue into the colour scheme. Through more research and my love of white woodwork and the white furniture we already had, the ‘seascape’ colour scheme was born for our living and dining room.
I chose this colour palette almost subconsciously, as my favourite place is the beach. I love it, but I want it to only inspire the colour palette and not the actual decor.
The Dulux paint we chose for our living and dining room
After trialling out different paint swatches we realised navy blue as a feature wall was a no go. It was going to be too dark for the room because of the lack of the natural light. So, I had a look around and found Denim Drift by Dulux and it was the perfect colour for our feature wall. It has a really light blue colour in strong lighting and goes very dark with no light, making it a great living room colour as it’s adaptive. It has made the room feel so relaxing!
The dining room has been given three walls of ‘Chic Shadow’ We chose to use this simply because we had a lot of it leftover from painting our hallway. It’s a really lovely grey that looks different depending on how the light hits it.
For the living room wall colours, we opted to paint the three walls in ‘Polished Pebble’ by Dulux. I love this grey, it’s so light it gives the room an airy feel and makes it feel bigger.
We decided navy was going to be simply too dark for our living and dining room feature wall because of the lack of natural light coming in from our windows. So we went for Denim Drift by Dulux and it’s the perfect blue. It can be light blue or dark blue depending on the lighting and it adds such a calming colour to the room.
Once the room feels finished, i’ll link the blog post here to show you the update!
Do you know somewhere that sells navy or grey room accents? Let me know below!