ZUVALifeCulture: The Great White Mystique: 10 all-white lounges

White is doing the rounds. I mean, everywhere you look, someone is filling their entire house with white, some restaurant is making you sit in an all white room, Seal is proposing in an igloo in all white (sorry for the divorce, though…)! A lot of people love it, including myself, understandably, too – it is an enduring trend.

I have fantasized for ages about a white bedroom and when I moved to Milan I committed to making it happen. It was difficult (and is still a work in progress) but achievable. The trick, I discovered, after a first round failure, is to break up the white. You don’t want to feel like you’re in a cheap Igloo-Fantasy, or (God forbid!) a psych ward!

To do this you either

A. Stick to an all-white scheme and introduce different shades and tones of white; or
B. Pick 2 or 3 accent colours.

This article focuses on option B (you should know by now that I love my bullet points). Using accent colours is a great way to reveal your unique personality or introduce a specific mood into your space. So what I’ve done for you is create an array of colour schemes to help you to approach this task of devising an all-white colour scheme for your lounge.

These schemes in the images below work because:

White is the basic colour for most of the furniture in the room in order to give white prevalence in the scheme i.e. couch, bookcase, coffee table.
Most of the schemes incorporate a balancing neutral to break up the white without interfering with the scheme’s other colours e.g. grey, beige, black
The accent colour is applied with discipline throughout several accents, e.g. scatter cushions and rugs
The accent colours exist in balancing proportions with each other but in lower proportion to the white e.g. a lot of white, a little bit of (sometimes equal amounts of) colour 2 & 3.

Enjoy! I’d love to hear which colour schemes you love the most and might try out.