4 Ways to Make Over Your Living Room

The Approach: Aim for Playfulness, Not Perfection

Forget about being matchy-matchy. Try a more relaxed, freewheeling strategy with your decor to give a space a sense of fun.

Designers: Tobin Heminway of Design Firm Nest, in Manhattan; Elena Colombo of Colombo Construction, in Brooklyn

Stick With Similar-Enough Shades

Introduce different tones of one color for a more lighthearted, less structured look. “I tell my clients to resist the safety of a perfectly matched room,” says Heminway. “When everything is the same, it deadens a space.” Try this: While in a hardware store, find a color on a paint chip, then choose a similar tone on a surrounding card. Here, the designers called out the blue accents in the rug with a lighter blue paint on the walls and spray-painted the mismatched thrift-shop side tables cobalt.