Our pictures show how a different colour choice can dramatically change the appearance of a room.

Warm or cool?
For South facing rooms, choose cooler colours, greens, blue/greens and blues, these colours create a cool, calm atmosphere. Cool colours always appear further away than warm ones and therefore help to make a room look more spacious by pushing back the walls. Rooms that benefit from a lot of natural light can take any of the cool colours without
looking cold.

For North facing rooms or to create a cosy, welcoming atmosphere use reds, pinks, oranges and yellows.
These colours are good also for making large rooms look smaller and more friendly. When planning a warm scheme remember the closer the colour is to a warm primary (red and yellow) the brighter it is, so not always as easy to live with as their softer cousins pink, peach, primrose etc.

Pure colours lightened with white are known as pastels. For example red lightened with white becomes pink, pure green becomes apple green etc. These colours always look fresh and pretty. They blend effortlessly with all muted colours and go well with furnishings. Pastels give a light, airy, romantic feel to a room.

All the research carried out on customer's buying habits over recent years shows that colour is by far the most important factor when buying carpet.

Do be careful, as with quality to be sure the colour you choose can cope with its location. Very light shades are not always advisable in areas where the footfall is heavy, so a complementary darker shade might be a better proposition.
Certainly lighter and mid tones give the impression of space, but they do need more care and attention. Sometimes a fleck or a small design can help you get your colour while at the same time camouflaging the odd little mark, so making care and maintenance easier.

Another point to remember is that colours can look different depending on the texture. A velvet pile may look paler than a twist in the same shade, so please ask if you are in any doubt.

You can brighten up a room by using colours from opposite sides of the Colour wheel - for example red and green, or blue and orange. These colours are known as contrasts, when placed together they intensify each other and produce a vibrancy.

The use of white with contrasting colours can be refreshing and will also accentuate the bright colours. If you pick colours that lie next to each other on the Colour wheel, you can be sure that they will combine well together because they are closely related. Nothing clashes or dominates, take yellow and orange, or lilac and mauve.

Neutrals range from white, through creams, beiges, and browns, and from palest silver grey to black. They are useful for combining with more definite colours, or you can use them to create all neutral schemes. Inspiration for all neutral schemes can be found in nature, the soft browns and tans of earth and wood ,the yellow of ripening corn, the colour of sand.