The rainy months of winter and fall are behind us and sunshine is taking the place of white-tip mountains, muddy brown leaves and skeletal trees.
Spring is a perfect time for home renovations and redesigning interiors, so let's meet the design colour of the season: green. The colour of jade and emerald, green conveys a natural feeling most often associated with nature.
Lesli Balagno is an interior designer with Heffel Balagno Design Consultant, which has an office in West Vancouver.
"Typically, when we design interiors, we won't pick a colour like green as a basis for our palette, but we'll bring a colour like that in as an accent," she explains.
Balagno describes green as a great complement to a larger room, rather than a foundation.
Any colour with vibrancy tends to come in and out of fashion, she says, which is why she tends to only use it in small and creative doses.
"Certainly we'll do it through architectural greenery," she says, noting in her office there are large vases for natural greenery, to bring the outdoors in.
For a kitchen, Balagno says touches of green can be added with green chairs, vases or even a dog dish, if you have a pet.
Balagno prefers a softened, grey, muddy-green tone of green.
"We will tile a bathroom in that sort of green," she says, adding the tone needs to be soft. "It can't be too powerful. It can't have too much pigment in it."
Furniture pieces in green can include a sofa, headboard or bedding, she adds. Another way to introduce green is by applying it to smaller rooms, like a powder room or a kids' room.
"That room we will take a little bit more creative license, and we might either half-paint the walls or use wall covering," she says. "Or do some sort of decorative treatment where we'll sort of step outside the box and have a really fun play with a colour like green."
Another way to introduce the colour green into your home is by putting in vegetation.
You can easily green a space with plant or tree pieces, or flowers, says Balagno.
Overall, green should be used in smaller doses in larger living rooms and dining rooms, but allow yourself to be creative for those smaller spaces in your house.
"Green is great because it obviously works beautifully with a natural colour palette. It's in our environment so it's so easily brought into a West Coast palette," says Balagno.
