Decorating your home to sell? Be careful – creating too much of a blank canvas isn’t always the best approach. These are our favourite colours to add character without losing your buyers’ interest…
If you’re decorating your home with an eye to selling, there is a lot of advice out there that essentially boils down to ‘bland is better’.
We feel there is a difference between tasteful, neutral interiors and a house painted in floor to ceiling magnolia – and it’s a difference that potential buyers will pick up on.
A not-too-blank canvas
When you’re selling your house, you are selling its potential as someone else’s home. Allowing viewers to project their own life and personality onto each room as they wander around is an important part of the selling process.
But a truly blank canvas can actually have a detrimental effect. It makes it harder for your prospective buyers to picture the house as their future home, and not a showroom. That’s without considering that if you have children, those pure cream walls might not look so pure after a week or so on the market.
And, let’s face it, cream is boring. If you’re toying with the idea of selling, but you’re not quite sure when – or even if it’s definitely going to happen – you don’t want to decorate your home in colours that you can’t live with comfortably.
On-trend vs mass appeal
We believe that painting a house in preparation to sell shouldn’t shy away from injecting colour, warmth and personality – up to a point.
Although we personally love the darker, bolder colours that are trending at the moment (Stiffkey blue being a current favourite in the Urban Village team), they are not to everyone’s taste – and the thought of how much emulsion is needed to cover them can be off-putting for buyers looking for an easy move. To keep on-trend without making a permanent statement, add bolder colours as accents on wooden furniture and soft furnishings, while keeping walls to softer shades.
Selling a home, not a house
Why does paint colour even matter? Well, the housing market is competitive. Look and feel is important, and the right colour scheme can really help to create that heart-racing, ‘I need to live here’ moment that often marks the difference between your house and another, similar home on the market.
In short, neutral doesn’t need to be boring. Here are some of our favourite paint colours that bring life to a property – and make an instant impression of warmth and character to your viewers.
Green
Natural and warm, green tones are a beautiful, serene background for living areas and kitchens.
Pale green: warmer than white but not overbearing
Blue
Great for bedrooms and bathrooms, soothing blue is a clean, crisp colour that’s easy for most buyers to envision their own furnishings and accessories against.
Blush
Growing in popularity over the last few years, pink and blush tones are a lively wall colour that adds personality without overbearing a space. A more recent addition to the ‘new neutrals’, but we love it.
Anything but cream
If you’re looking for something really simple and natural, but don’t want your home to look like an art gallery or office block, these grey, stone and off-white shades are tasteful, not dull.
- Lamp room gray by Farrow and Ball
- Birch White by Sanderson
- Inox by Little Greene
- Elephants Breath by Farrow & Ball
Soft greys are still bright, fresh and neutral, but not as stark as white
And finally…off-white ceilings and skirting boards
Keep it classic but not too cold. An off-white shade will give a warmer tone to a room than pristine white, especially one with high ceilings. It’s best to match the shade to the room colours you have chosen, but keep this colour consistent throughout the house unless you are opting to make a colour statement (although as we mentioned earlier, if you’re planning to sell, it might not be the best time to experiment with on-trend accents like black skirting and colour block ceilings).
Some of our favourites:
Whether you’re looking to sell fast or are simply mulling the idea over for the long-term, we’d love to chat. Give us a call on 0203 519 9121 or drop into our Denmark Hill office, tell us about your home and we can talk through creating a path to market that’s right for you.
And if you’re looking for more house-move inspiration and advice, follow us on Twitter @UVHomes1