How to Use Colour in Interior Design: The Five Colours Make Us Blind
“The five colours make a man blind.” — Laozi, Tao Te Ching
More than two thousand years ago, Laozi wrote that the five colours make us blind. The five tones make us deaf. The five flavours dull the taste. I came across this recently and it stopped me.
Not because I think the answer to using colour in interior design is that we should all immediately paint our houses beige. Quite the opposite. It was the idea that too much visual information can eventually prevent us from really seeing anything at all.
I think rooms can be noisy.
Not noisy in the literal sense, but in the way a badly composed piece of music can be. Everything might technically be doing what it should, and yet something jars. Sometimes it is loud and obvious. More often, it's simply one note that's off. You might not even be able to identify it, but you feel it. And I think we've become rather bad at listening to that feeling.
When did choosing colours for our homes become so binary? The conversation around colour in interiors seems to have become incredibly polarised. You either LOVE colour ( capital letters very much intended ) and presumably want a rainbow exploding across every surface, or you're in the tasteful camp of whites, taupes, blacks and neutral interiors.
Where is everything in between?
Go and stand in a garden and really look at the greens. There aren't three approved shades that have been carefully selected because they work together. There are hundreds. Blue greens, yellow greens, grey greens, almost-black greens. New leaves next to old ones, moss against stone, glossy foliage beside something soft and chalky.
And somehow, none of it looks as though it clashes. Nature doesn't appear terribly concerned with a colour wheel. Perhaps when we're choosing a colour palette for our homes, we need to become a little less rigid too.
Are we choosing colour — or being told what to choose? There's another reason I think we've become so prescriptive about interior colour: it's much easier to sell.The commercial world needs us to want the look. The specific shade. The new season's colour. The latest interior design colour trend.
It reassures us that if we buy this particular green, or paint our kitchen this particular brown, our homes will somehow feel current and, perhaps more importantly, we'll feel as though we've got it right. But considered interior design doesn't really work like that.
A good interior leans into the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the house and the people living in it. The slightly strange light in one room. The stone that was already there. The view from a window. The chair someone refuses to get rid of. The colour you've apparently been buying and wearing for the past twenty years without ever consciously deciding it was your favourite. These things are far more interesting to me than the colour we're all supposed to be using this year.
“ Your wardrobe probably knows more than your Pinterest board “ If you're genuinely unsure how to choose colours for your home, I'd start upstairs rather than in a paint shop. Open your wardrobe. Ignore the wedding guest dress and the questionable purchase still carrying its label. Look at what you actually wear. Perhaps there are five pairs of blue trousers, three pink shirts and one white jumper. There's your starting point.
Blue is clearly somewhere you feel comfortable, so perhaps those tones become the thread quietly running through your home. Pink might appear less frequently, and white less again. Then I'd probably throw in the equivalent of the slightly unexpected shoe or bracelet, perhaps a flash of red somewhere — simply because rooms, like outfits, become more interesting when something stops them being too perfectly coordinated.
The point isn't to turn your wardrobe into another interior colour formula. It's to notice what you already instinctively know.
“ Sometimes a room needs less, not more” I think decorating a room is a little like getting dressed for a wedding or family birthday. You've mentally planned the outfit a few days beforehand. Then the day arrives and you start tinkering. Different shoes. Perhaps the bracelet. Another necklace. Should you change the bag? Sometimes that final addition makes everything click. And sometimes you look in the mirror and realise you were better before you started fiddling.
Rooms are exactly the same. We have become very good at asking, What else does this room need? I'm much more interested in occasionally asking, What could I take away?
Restraint in interior design isn't the same as minimalism. It doesn't mean a lack of personality, pattern or colour. It means having enough confidence to recognise when you've reached the point where another layer won't add anything.
How much colour is too much colour? At our Woodside project, the living room needed precisely that restraint. We pared back the joinery, ceiling and woodwork by using the same shade throughout, then added texture through wallpaper inlays within the doors, again working within the same tonal family. Nothing was shouting. The result was incredibly tranquil.
But walk into the adjoining room and the answer was completely different. There we used a beautiful deep blue across the media wall and bookcase, alongside an abstract leopard-print wallpaper in a fresh spring green. On paper, you might assume I would approve of one approach and reject the other.
I love both. Because successful colourful interiors aren't about following a rule for how many colours you should use in a room. The question was never, How many colours are we allowed? The question was whether the room could hold them.
Colour, neurodiversity and visual noise! My work around neurodiversity and interior design has made me think about this even more.I've always felt that neurodivergent people can have one foot in another world. Almost as though we're occasionally able to see behind the curtain of how things actually work.
For me, sound and colour don't always exist as entirely separate things. They can melt into tone and atmosphere. You don't necessarily consciously identify that the blue is wrong, or that a pattern is fighting with something three metres away. You simply know the space isn't flowing.
There's a mental noise to it. And perhaps neurodivergent minds sometimes experience that more acutely. I don't think that means there's a special set of colours for a neurodivergent home — far from it. It's made me more interested in intuition. In recognising that our bodies often register a space before our conscious minds have managed to explain what's wrong with it.
Good interior design, for me, is partly about paying attention to that response.
Perhaps Laozi wasn't telling us to use fewer colours Which brings me back to those five colours. I don't think the interesting interpretation of Laozi's words is that five colours are simply too many. Forcing colour into rules can make us just as blind as overwhelming ourselves with it.
Perhaps blindness comes when we stop really looking.
When we accept that green is this green because someone has told us it is the colour of the season. When we decide we aren't “a colour person”. When we reproduce an interior colour palette because we've seen it work beautifully in somebody else's house. When we keep adding because a room doesn't yet resemble the finished image we had in our heads.
Instead, look at your garden. Look at your wardrobe. Look at the strange patch of afternoon light that changes the colour of your walls completely.
And then look at the room again. If something feels off, don't automatically add another thing to fix it. Perhaps it doesn't need more. Perhaps, like a piece of music, you just need to find the note that's making all the others harder to hear.
There comes a point when looking at more paint charts, saving more images and ordering another round of samples stops being helpful. You probably already have the beginnings of the answer — you just need some clarity around how to bring it all together.
That’s exactly what we can work through in a Help I’m Stuck consultation. We’ll look at the colours, materials and pieces you already have, identify what’s working and what isn’t, and make the decisions that have been holding you back.
By the end of the session, you’ll know which colour is going on the walls, what’s staying, what needs to change and, most importantly, feel confident enough to actually get on with it.
So, if those tester pots have been sitting on the wall for rather longer than you’d care to admit, come and spend a session with me. Let’s get you unstuck.
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