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Fight clutter with color – Metro US

Fight clutter with color

Clutter and color can be a living space’s worst enemies. It’s just too easy to accumulate too much of both. But, with some planning, color can cut clutter, bringing much sought after calm to a room.

Boston and Los Angeles-based interior designer Gregor Cann of Cann Design uses a method called color blocking. Simply, this is a bold swathe of color along a wall, even continuing through a couple of rooms, to both organize stuff, and disguise inherent design faults. At its most simple, this process can be as costless and easy as organizing your knickknacks and furniture into groups of the same color. But, as Cann points out, adding a painted color block — either an entire wall or a band of color — to a room can be a dramatic, and inexpensive way to brighten drab spaces, or tie together objects, say a bunch of pictures hung on a wall, which becomes more focused in a color block. On a grander scale, running a color panel throughout the home can reinforce the architecture, giving small rooms a sense of space.

The process works with modern design and in a traditional, classic room, too. The beauty is that you have control. “You can be subtle about this or you can really dial it up,” says Cann. “It depends on how much color you use and how big the blocks are. You can look at a wall and [the pale stripe] doesn’t immediately strike you. Then you think, ‘Oh yes, there’s a color block there’. Or it can be really vivid. Color is the most simple and emphatic thing you can do for your home. Nothing goes further than a gallon of paint.”