7 Ways a Colorful Couch Can Add Personality to Your Living Room

While choosing a neutral-colored sofa makes sense in terms of providing a backdrop that’s easy to accessorize, why go bland when you can go bold? We’re living in a veritable heyday of furniture design, when you can find upholstered pieces in practically any pigment. By choosing a couch in your favorite shade, it can not only infuse mood-boosting vibes into your home but also more accurately convey your personal style better than a beige or gray one could. 

And just because a couch happens to have an inkling of color doesn’t mean it can’t function as a beautiful anchor in your living space. Whether it’s a moody green velvet settee or a mauve-tinged modular sofa, you can just as easily accessorize it the same way you could if it were a neutral piece of furniture. In fact, working within a color palette that really makes your heart sing might even make it easier (and certainly more fun!) to decorate your home. 

Here are seven ways a colorful couch can dial up the personality and style in your space.

Mario Bellini’s Camaleonda sofa is hands down the most well-loved couch on Instagram, particularly by stylish influencers like Aimee Song. And when you opt for it in an electrifying orange fabric like homeowner Tay BeepBopp, who was lucky enough to score hers secondhand, it could easily steal the show in your space. Instead, when positioned in front of a dreamy wall mural of gorgeous white herons, as Tay did in her Victorian San Francisco home, it works synergistically to tell a beautiful color story of fun and levity.

Since red, blue, and yellow are primary colors, they have the potential of coming across as somewhat childlike. However, when you temper them into muted shades of slate, paprika, and mustard, suddenly they’re sophisticated, as seen in this London flat that Clare O’Connell shares with her boyfriend and son. A gorgeous red velvet sofa sits at the heart of the living room, peppered with accent pillows shaped like seashells, which harmonizes seamlessly with a striped loveseat, mustard yellow armchair, and walls painted in “Oval Room Blue” by Farrow & Ball.

Some folks prefer their spaces to be bright and airy, while others, like Ky Ismet and James Burrow, favor spaces that are dark and moody. When they found their Victorian terraced house in London, they got right to work injecting a modern gothic style into it. How? Painting the walls with an inky blue-black color called “Railings” by Farrow & Ball and opting for a navy blue velvet sofa. The tone-on-tone pairing really envelopes the space with a moody coziness, which is further enhanced by the abundance of candles scattered about from their candle and aromatherapy business, A House Like This.

The Camaleonda sofa by Mario Bellini is just too good that we had to share it twice, this time spotted in a dusty rose hue in this New York City loft rented by Michelle Pham and her partner Akshay Kumar. It acts as the focal point of their reading room, which is artfully filled with an impressive collection of books and plants. Though the sofa has a playful pink pigment, its solid color actually serves as a grounding piece amongst the other patterns in the home’s maximalist decor.

Mustard is a color commonly found in the kitchen fridge, but it turns out that it also lives beautifully in the living room swathed in luxe velvet across a mid-century style sofa, as seen in this Park Slope rental shared by Maggie Mae and her partner Jesse. While it has a deeply rich tone, it still acts somewhat as a neutral, playing well with a multitude of other patterns and colors. And since the hue is often seen on antique furniture, it adds a lovely vintage element to their space.

Pink and blue can easily skew toward kids’ colors, but a pairing of salmon and teal is decidedly not childlike. See for yourself in this Chicago apartment rented by Jamie and Mike. Their tufted teal sofa sets the stage for a colorful living space surrounded by soft pink walls painted in Benjamin Moore’s “Conch Shell.” Pops of gold and green round out the palette in this cozy home, which features lots of creative DIY storage solutions to house their remarkable collection of over 1,000 books.

When you score a vintage curved couch from Facebook Marketplace for $50, chances are you’re going to want to reupholster it. Well, not unless it’s a dupe for a $9,900 green velvet one on 1stDibs. Then you clean it and thank your lucky stars, like Annie Veron did with the gorgeous green sofa in her San Diego apartment. Paired with blush-colored pillows and a dark pink Turkish rug, its curvy lines and sage green fabric makes a glamorous statement in her small space.