How to escape the ‘match-match’ trap and make your home feel more collected

Home decorator and content creator Grace H is one of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on colourful home design, mixing vintage pieces with new and making personality-filled spaces. See the rest of her articles here.

As a child of the ’80s, it was instilled in me by my lovely mum that everything should match.

Once you'd committed to a colour scheme, let’s say peach and green (it was the ’80s, after all) every cushion, lampshade and decorative vase had to be purchased in the exact same shade.

Bonus points if you could find everything under one roof, from the same shop. The more matching, the better.

Thankfully, times have changed.

If you're even lucky enough to be able to afford a house these days, how we choose to furnish them has changed too. We now hear words like whimsical, and eclectic bandied around on social media, while every other post seems to be telling us we need this or that to achieve a Nancy Meyers-style home. And honestly? It can all get a little confusing.

One minute you're being told to mix everything, the next you're being given a very specific list of things you apparently must buy. It's contradictory, overwhelming and can leave you wondering whether you've accidentally done your entire living room wrong.

So, let's break it down and try to get ourselves out of the ‘match-match' trap.

Ditch the furniture sets

If all of your furniture has come from the same shop, in the same finish, this is probably the first place I'd start. I'm not suggesting you throw everything out or immediately get it listed on Vinted. Please don't. We're trying to make things easier, be more environmentally conscious and not create a full-time job for ourselves. Instead, try moving pieces into different rooms to break up the matching sets.

A farmhouse dining table can look brilliant with more modern chairs. A chest of drawers in a different material or finish to your bedside tables can instantly make a bedroom feel more collected and lived in. And please, mix your metals.

Brass and chrome? Fine. Bronze and nickel? Also, fine.

Introducing different materials, finishes and textures is one of the easiest ways to stop a room feeling as though you walked into a showroom and pointed at everything and said, “yes please!”.

A room needs more than two colours

Let's go back to our peach and green example.

If peach and green are your starting point, don't be afraid to introduce a little pale blue, a deeper green, pink, butter yellow… or whatever else catches your eye. You don’t need every colour to match perfectly.

Take my peach and mint green office, for example. I’ve added yellow blinds, a red sofa and a pink frame filled with colourful artwork. None of these colours match exactly, and that’s the point. Together, they create a room that feels playful, layered and full of personality.

A room doesn't need to stick rigidly to two colours. In fact, adding different shades and tones is often what makes a space feel interesting. If you're not sure where to start, the colour wheel is your friend.

Colour confidence

You could choose three colours that sit next to one another on the wheel - for example, red, orange and yellow – to create a harmonious scheme.

Or, if you fancy a little more contrast, try colours that sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as green and red.

You can also play with different tones within the same colour family. Think pale pink with raspberry or fuchsia. Baby blue with a deeper, inky blue.

Another option is to choose three colours that form a triangle on the colour wheel – red, blue and yellow, for example. These way of combining colours is tried and tested, which is helpful when you're building your confidence.

But once you have the basics right, don't be afraid to break the rules. In fact, I think rooms often look their best when there's something in them that doesn't quite go. Something a little unexpected.

The whole unexpected red theory is proof of this. Sometimes a small pop of a colour that seemingly has no business being there is exactly what makes a room feel interesting.

I tend to have a little touch of red and yellow in almost every room because they’re my favourites, even though my room wall colours range from green, pink, yellow, blue and mint.

Does it all technically match? Probably not.

Does that matter? Absolutely not.

If in doubt, start with a cushion

This is probably my favourite starting point if you're feeling completely overwhelmed by colour.

Find a cushion you absolutely love – one with lots of different colours in it – and use that as your starting point (you could do the same with a favourite piece of artwork or a rug).

Let's take my most recent cushion as an example. It has green (three different shades) as well as yellow, pink (two different tones), rust and blue.

There's your colour palette.

Then, I like to look for the colour that's featured the least and pull that out first. In this case, I could choose the raspberry, dark green or yellow and use one of those as my wall colour. In my living room I went for green.

Then, choose another shade (again, ideally not the most dominant one) and use that somewhere else in the room. For me, that was a raspberry sofa. Then keep adding.

Add different shades and tones throughout the space, using the colours in your original cushion as your guide. Suddenly, everything starts to speak to one another because you've created a thread that runs through the room.

Your walls don't need to be the same colour as your sofa. Your sofa doesn't need to match your cushions. Your cushions don't need to match your curtains. They simply need to have something that connects them. Use the cushion fabric as your anchor to keep returning to.

Don't be afraid of a little red

And then, because apparently, I can't help myself, I like to add a touch of red (or yellow).

In this particular space, that would be through the side tables and a few decorative pieces. It doesn't have to be a lot. A tiny flash can be enough.

Red is one of those colours that can make a room feel more intentional, more interesting and, a little less like you've played it safe.

Start small

It really doesn't take much to break the spell of the match-match trap. You don't need to redecorate your entire house. Start small.

Introduce one piece at a time. Try a different coloured lamp, a cushion that brings a new shade into the room or a chair in a contrasting finish. Give yourself time to live with things.

The most interesting homes aren't created overnight – they’re layered slowly over time; with pieces you genuinely love.

And Pinterest can be a brilliant resource when you're trying to build your colour confidence. Type in two colours you're thinking of using together and you'll find plenty of examples, mood boards and colour combinations to get you started.

Of course, we don't want exact replicas of somebody else's home. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with using other people's spaces as inspiration while you figure out what you like.

Mix your metals. Clash your colours. Put the weird lamp next to the beautiful chest of drawers. Add the red. Buy the cushion.

And if someone tells you it doesn't go? Tell them it wasn't supposed to.