For more than 10 years, I’ve led Apartment Therapy’s real home content, producing thousands of house tours from around the world. Currently, I live in my maximalist dream home in New Orleans, Louisiana, with my partner, a perfect dog, and a cute cat.
Originally from California, but turned New Yorker since 2000, I’ve been shooting my entire life and am still inspired and excited about it. Lately I have been putting my energies into my Fine Art, which can be seen on my website and on Saatchi Art. Being infatuated with interior design doesn’t hurt either, which mixes well with my love of photographing interiors.
Originally from California, but turned New Yorker since 2000, I’ve been shooting my entire life and am still inspired and excited about it. Lately I have been putting my energies into my Fine Art, which can be seen on my website and on Saatchi Art. Being infatuated with interior design doesn’t hurt either, which mixes well with my love of photographing interiors.
We independently select these products—if you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. All prices were accurate at the time of publishing.
While choosing a neutral-colored sofa makes sense in terms of providing a backdrop that’s easy to accessorize, why go bland when you can go bold? We’re living in a veritable heyday of furniture design, when you can find upholstered pieces in practically any pigment. By choosing a couch in your favorite shade, it can not only infuse mood-boosting vibes into your home but also more accurately convey your personal style better than a beige or gray one could.
And just because a couch happens to have an inkling of color doesn’t mean it can’t function as a beautiful anchor in your living space. Whether it’s a moody green velvet settee or a mauve-tinged modular sofa, you can just as easily accessorize it the same way you could if it were a neutral piece of furniture. In fact, working within a color palette that really makes your heart sing might even make it easier (and certainly more fun!) to decorate your home.
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Here are seven ways a colorful couch can dial up the personality and style in your space.
Mario Bellini’s Camaleonda sofa is hands down the most well-loved couch on Instagram, particularly by stylish influencers like Athena Calderone and Aimee Song. And when you opt for it in an electrifying orange fabric like homeowner Tay BeepBopp, who was lucky enough to score hers secondhand, it could easily steal the show in your space. Instead, when positioned in front of a dreamy wall mural of gorgeous white herons, as Tay did in her Victorian San Francisco home, it works synergistically to tell a beautiful color story of fun and levity.
Since red, blue, and yellow are primary colors, they have the potential of coming across as somewhat childlike. However, when you temper them into muted shades of slate, paprika, and mustard, suddenly they’re sophisticated, as seen in this London flat that Clare O’Connell shares with her boyfriend and son. A gorgeous red velvet sofa sits at the heart of the living room, peppered with accent pillows shaped like seashells, which harmonizes seamlessly with a striped loveseat, mustard yellow armchair, and walls painted in “Oval Room Blue” by Farrow & Ball.
Some folks prefer their spaces to be bright and airy, while others, like Ky Ismet and James Burrow, favor spaces that are dark and moody. When they found their Victorian terraced house in London, they got right to work injecting a modern gothic style into it. How? Painting the walls with an inky blue-black color called “Railings” by Farrow & Ball and opting for a navy blue velvet sofa. The tone-on-tone pairing really envelopes the space with a moody coziness, which is further enhanced by the abundance of candles scattered about from their candle and aromatherapy business, A House Like This.
The Camaleonda sofa by Mario Bellini is just too good that we had to share it twice, this time spotted in a dusty rose hue in this New York City loft rented by Michelle Pham and her partner Akshay Kumar. It acts as the focal point of their reading room, which is artfully filled with an impressive collection of books and plants. Though the sofa has a playful pink pigment, its solid color actually serves as a grounding piece amongst the other patterns in the home’s maximalist decor.
Mustard is a color commonly found in the kitchen fridge, but it turns out that it also lives beautifully in the living room swathed in luxe velvet across a mid-century style sofa, as seen in this Park Slope rental shared by Maggie Mae and her partner Jesse. While it has a deeply rich tone, it still acts somewhat as a neutral, playing well with a multitude of other patterns and colors. And since the hue is often seen on antique furniture, it adds a lovely vintage element to their space.
Pink and blue can easily skew toward kids’ colors, but a pairing of salmon and teal is decidedly not childlike. See for yourself in this Chicago apartment rented by Jamie and Mike. Their tufted teal sofa sets the stage for a colorful living space surrounded by soft pink walls painted in Benjamin Moore’s “Conch Shell.” Pops of gold and green round out the palette in this cozy home, which features lots of creative DIY storage solutions to house their remarkable collection of over 1,000 books.
When you score a vintage curved couch from Facebook Marketplace for $50, chances are you’re going to want to reupholster it. Well, not unless it’s a dupe for a $9,900 green velvet one on 1stDibs. Then you clean it and thank your lucky stars, like Annie Veron did with the gorgeous green sofa in her San Diego apartment. Paired with blush-colored pillows and a dark pink Turkish rug, its curvy lines and sage green fabric makes a glamorous statement in her small space.
We independently select these products—if you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. All prices were accurate at the time of publishing.
Name: Anatolia, husband, Frank; and two daughters, Amelia and Gisella
Location: London, United Kingdom
Size: 972 square feet
Type of home: A three-bedroom 1930s terraced house
Years lived in: 24 years, owned
Originally from Italy, Anatolia describes her home — a three-bedroom terraced house built in the 1930s — as a “Mediterranean oasis in the middle of London.” But it’s not just the Mediterranean that has inspired the home she shares with her family (husband Frank and two daughters), their travels in other regions around the world have had a visual impact on the home they’ve owned for 24 years. “The green bathroom wall tiles were inspired by the beautiful zellige tiles that we saw in Morocco, but also by the amazing emerald waters of the Mexican cenotes we dived into. The terrazzo floor tiles were inspired by the floors in all Italian period palazzos,” she describes.
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My style: I tend to not just stick to a particular style or trend; I love to experiment with different designs, and mix various materials and colors to create visual interest to an interior whilst keeping it harmonious and tasteful.
Inspiration: Most of the time the inspiration to my interior design or decor comes from our travels around the world. The green bathroom wall tiles were inspired by the beautiful zellige tiles that we saw in Morocco, but also by the amazing emerald waters of the Mexican cenotes we dived into. The terrazzo floor tiles were inspired by the floors in all Italian period palazzos.
Favorite element: My favorite spot in the house is sitting at the dining table in my bright and airy kitchen. I’m always drawn to nature so whether I’m eating, having coffee with a friend, working on my laptop or with the sewing machine, this is the place I love to sit at, as I can enjoy a full view of the garden during all seasons.
Biggest challenge: When we bought this house, the previous owners had already built a kitchen extension. But it was a rectangular box that didn’t offer the light I was craving, and it did not have enough storage space. Both me and my husband love cooking and baking, so having a kitchen that didn’t have enough storage and work surfaces was a real problem for us. I had this vision of having friends and family around and us all being in one room while I’m cooking, and that simply wasn’t an option in the space we had before. It was also very, very dark; no matter how much I made the space look pretty, it just didn’t feel like a very pleasant space to be.
So in 2020, after years of hard saving and extensive research, we decided to demolish the current extension and rebuild a new, bigger one. We found that gaining extra square meters by building out wasn’t enough of an answer to what I wanted to achieve. We thought that a good way to accentuate the feeling of space was to go higher so instead of a flat roof, we went for a high double-pitched roof and a large expanse of glass, which allows a seamless link to the garden. So now 320 square feet of kitchen space feels more like 640! Also, thanks to four large skylight windows on the vaulted ceiling, we can now enjoy long hours of daylight even in the winter and on a clear night; if we turn off all the nearby lights, we can even do a bit of stargazing!
Is there something unique about your home or the way you use it? My kitchen’s cabinetry is custom built and surprisingly it did not cost any much more than it would have cost me if bought from a kitchen showroom. I know because I went around to about seven of them, but I was never satisfied with what they were offering. They were too standard and very limiting in size, design, and colors. Then, by chance, I met a very talented furniture maker and although he had only built one kitchen before (his own!), he made me realize that I could have the kitchen of my dreams! My kitchen now fits the space and my needs like a glove. The kitchen is full of bespoke details: The depth of the wall cabinets was planned to accommodate my largest dinner plates. The tall cabinets are higher than standard. The kitchen plinths, which is the wasted space underneath the cupboards, are traditionally always between 10 to 15 centimeters high, but our kitchen fitter suggested reducing that to 5 centimeters to enable us to have more usable cabinet space — ingenious! I’ve got a special socket built into the kitchen island cabinet, under the cooker, so I can plug in my whisk next to the hob [stove]. And I got to choose the color for the cabinets: “Oval Room Blue,” of Farrow & Ball, which is one of my favorite blues.
What are your favorite products you have bought for your home and why? One of our most favorite products in our home is the pocket sliding system for our doors. When we renovated the whole of the ground floor at the same time as extending, many of our interior walls came down, so we had the opportunity to install pocket doors. These are doors that slide in to a wall cavity so that, when fully opened, the door virtually disappears into the wall. We have three of these in our house. They helped to maximize the space, increasing floor and wall space for furniture and interior design.
Also, our new bidet setup in both of our bathrooms is something we are very proud of and the decision to have it was down to some quick thinking done at the right time. In fact, at the time that we were having plumbing work done in the bathrooms, we asked our plumber to run hot water pipes (as well as the standard cold ones) all the way to the toilet (as well as the sink and shower). Thanks to affordable bidet attachments which we purchased from Amazon.co.uk, we now can regulate the temperature of the water. We now have a fully functioning bidet washlet within the toilet, allowing for a pleasant hygienic experience.
Please describe any helpful, inspiring, brilliant, or just plain useful small-space maximizing and/or organizing tips you have: Our cleverly hidden laundry/pantry room is built in a cabinet within the kitchen and is a brilliant use of an otherwise wasted corner. Sometimes I forget to show it to my visitors, and when I go to open the doors to get something and I hear them exclaiming “WOW!” because they didn’t expect a whole room behind the cabinet doors!
Finally, what’s your absolute best home secret or decorating advice? Don’t be afraid of white walls! In Italy, where I’m from, we tend to paint our walls white and add pops of color with art, prints, plates, tapestries, and other wall decor. White walls also offer the best backdrop to make stand-out furniture pop.
When looking to buy items of furniture, first look at Facebook Marketplace. My oak Habitat dining table, my IKEA yellow armchair, and my pair of Wayfair blue chairs were all purchased second-hand, but in like-new condition, on FB marketplace. It’s a real treasure trove and a fantastic place to make a lot of savings.