As spring really plants its feet, fresh bright color starts popping up all over: the saucy flaunts of azalea, rhododendron and forsythia, and the watercolor-inspired pastels.
Benjamin Moore’s color of the year, Breath of Fresh Air, is a whispery blue-gray, said Ellen O’Neill, Benjamin Moore’s creative director.
Accent hues include pale peach and lavender, working as well with dressed-up rooms as with slouchier, more relaxed spaces.
New York City-based designer Elaine Griffin sees “a new feminization in design — daintier details, urban materials interpreted in elegant, classical shapes.”
She also likes a color that had its heyday a couple of decades ago: “Beige is back. And it looks fresh again anchoring a room of subtler hues like gray, ivory, taupe, pink, aqua, even a softened olive.
Watercolor songbirds and irises are on artwork at West Elm, the latter painted on birch wood.
Lauren Conrad’s Tea Berry bedding collection for Kohl’s is done in a dreamy mix of peach, mint and cream.
At the High Point Furniture Market in North Carolina, where designs for spring are introduced, the emphasis was on intense blues: cobalt, lapis and sapphire.
Wisteria offers a Louis XVI-style chair upholstered in royal blue linen and a blue-glazed ceramic stool that could find a comfy spot indoors or out.
Pottery Barn’s Cambria collection of Portuguese stoneware comes in a deep ocean blue with coordinating indigo napery in polka dots or tile prints.
Radiant Orchid and Exclusive Plum, two more colors of the year, are showing up on accessories and furniture like All Modern’s Sunpan velvet bench with Lucite legs, and slipper chairs, side tables and trays at Homegoods.
Pennsylvania-based custom cabinetmaker Plain &Fancy is even offering versions of the hue for accent pieces like kitchen islands, media centers and armoires.
Crisp apple red adds punch to neutrals in Target’s Threshold Windham collection of floor cabinets for storage and an upholstered armchair.
Griffin likes lemon yellow as an accent color. Fashion designers such as Marissa Webb and Derek Lam, and retailers such as H&M and Joe Fresh, embraced that hue this season, and decor is following suit.
A throw pillow quilted to resemble subway tiles; octagonal and square dinnerware; and a galvanized trunk that could work as both storage and table are all at CB2 in taxicab yellow.
Muse and You turns a single bloom into modern art underfoot with the Rosa rug, while the Morocco employs hot pink, carnation and plum in a tile-print rug.
Portuguese artist Danny Ivan creates digital prints with a pop art aesthetic: His Colorful Mountains design is an explosion of vivid, graphic, cubist shapes.
Three of the Possessed, an Australian design collective, renders geometric patterns and images of birds and animals in colorful prismatic designs.
Give a room a spring facelift with new lampshades. Seascape Lamps has punchy modern graphic designs in plum and tangerine.
A whimsical sketched garden on deep burgundy brings in a contemporary country vibe, and there are photo-printed lemons and cherries, as well.
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