10 Unexpected Ways to Embrace Color, According to a Design Pro

Noz Nozawa, the San Francisco-based founder of Noz Design and a 2024 BHG Stylemaker, believes good design comes from recognizing inspiration all around you. “My goal as a designer is to free folks from feeling like there are rules, shoulds, or should nots,” says Nozawa. See how she finds inspiration and pulls together fun, free-spirited rooms that burst with bold, unexpected color combos.

1. Keep What Inspires You

Nozawa tucks items that move her—a well-made tassel, Japanese folk art, notes on a color combo spotted from the car window—into what she calls a “funsie” drawer in her office. It’s the key to her decorating ethos, which is to be open to inspiration everywhere and feel free to experiment. She says paying attention to the objects that speak to her is “how I learned what colors I like together or what colors I can find a way to put together.”

2. Color It Bold

For her room in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach, Nozawa opted for the unconventional palette of “tomato red and lavender purple-pink,” nodding to a rule she learned to break from her high school’s Red Hat Society. Its members proudly wore the red-purple combo considered garish by some. “They were all about living your best life!” Nozawa says.

3. Mix It Up

“It’s totally fine if an object or furniture piece doesn’t seem to go with your space. If you love it, you can find a way to work it in,” she says. In her modern apartment in a historic neighborhood, Nozawa cultivates a mix of styles that includes a 1970s sofa, a settee in antique French style, and curtains painted to look like old tapestries.

4. Utilize the Floor

In an open-concept home where it can be difficult to create a volume of color, Nozawa suggests that you “see the floor as the sixth wall and play with a bold statement in the carpeting. We went with similar values in terms of the colors, going for full saturation of the rugs and furniture. ”The jewel tones repeat in the artwork and create a sense of continuity.

5. Use the Rainbow

Playing off Coco Chanel’s advice to look in the mirror and remove an accessory, Nozawa prefers “rainbows where one color is pulled out.” The color-blocked kitchen, for example, is missing green. Nozawa also recommends adding a grounding color to bright spaces. “I always like for there to be black in the room somewhere. It allows the eye to rest on something consistent and true so your eyes process the balance of colors.”

6. Color Wash

What’s a foolproof way to bring statement color into your home? “Do a super-bold paint color on the walls and keep almost everything else in the room neutral,” Nozawa says. In this living room, metallic side tables and a gray rug and sofas—which echo the marble in the fireplace—let the wall color play the leading role. Yellow accents—nearly opposite of blue on the color wheel—add hints of contrast.

7. Think Full Spectrum

“I encourage folks not to feel like they can do only one paint color on the walls with a white ceiling,” Nozawa says. The light pink ceiling meshes with the fuchsia walls, Easter egg pink fireplace, and almost-magenta trim to create an enveloping effect that is anything but one-note. A blush sofa in the bay window is so light it reads almost white, offering the eye a respite from the intensity.

8. Take Inspo from Wallpaper

To create an indoor-outdoor feel in a room with small windows, Nozawa chose a jungle-theme wallpaper then picked an aubergine tone out of the paper and used it for the woodwork. “We wanted it to feel very cozy,” she says. To balance the bold hue, she made sure the furnishings, including a caramel-color leather sofa and cream shades, look “more neutral than explosive.”

9. Add a Palette Cleanser

By anchoring this nursery in black and white, Nozawa created a “joyful and exuberant” room that would also grow with her client’s baby. To breakup the news print effect, she chose a tawny leather rocking chair and fashioned pillows out of mud-cloth textiles. “It felt like a great way to bring in earthy, contrasting tones,” she says.

10. Go Graphic

In a living room where wainscoting, windows, and built-in bookcases took up much of the wall space, Nozawa went with wallpaper in a bold pattern without fear that it might overwhelm the space. The black-and-white backdrop allows for a strong accent color of purple, different versions of which show up in the armchairs and the two-tone, graphic rug.