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Yellow Bedroom Color Ideas

Yellow bedroom color ideas, from full-on sunshine to subtle tints and clever yellow accents - create an upbeat, happy summer vibe in your bedroom!

yellow bedroom paint and design ideas: yellow and white bedroom color scheme
The hue for this sunshine yellow bedroom paint color was taken from the yellow bedspread and accent pillows. (© Cherie King)

Saturate yellow is a wonderfully positive color, an energizing hue.

The simplest way to keep the look fresh and clean is to surround yellow colors with neutrals, especially plenty of white.

When you're (re-)decorating, hold off on the bedroom wall colors as long as you can.

There's always a bigger choice of paints than of fabrics, carpets & furniture.

Yellow accents = Bursts Of Sunshine!

neutral bedroom with mustard yellow bedspread
Neutral bedroom with yellow bedspread in Cassis, France. © Henri Del Olmo via côté maison

You don't need a lot of yellow to create a big impact. The bedroom above consists almost entirely of neutrals - white, black/charcoal, and golden brown - but the mustard yellow bed coverlet adds an amazing dose of 'zing' to the color scheme.

Yellow is so powerful that, even if you use it in very small doses (i.e. for accents rather than as bedroom paint color), you just can't overlook it in the overall bedroom color scheme:

yellow accents with neutral bedroom paint colors
Yellow accents with neutral bedroom paint colors. © left: sköna hem; right: bokeh b.

The 'sunshine effect' works exceptionally well against a backdrop of neutral bedroom colors: white, cream, grey, charcoal.

A single cushion (oh, make that a gorgeous, BIG one!), a piece of yellow wall art, yellow flowers or a yellow accent wall may be all your bedroom needs to lift its mood and energy.

Yellow Bedroom Variations: Creating A Color Scheme

The usual way to create a bedroom color scheme is to start with one item (say, the yellow quilts below) and develop the color palette from there. To see how this works, check out the following example, a pared-down French château bedroom.

Here's the original photo of the bedroom. On my screen (it may be different on yours), the wall color looks a bit too pinkish for the two 'golden' quilts. To really match the quilts, we'd need more primary yellow on the walls.

simple yellow chateau bedroom color scheme in France
Simple yellow château bedroom, France. (© Charlotte Marillet)

So let's use this room as an example of how you can create subtle mood shifts, just by making very slight changes to the bedroom paint color.

A. Setting The Right Color Mood

Here are three bedroom color ideas for the above yellow bedroom:

yellow color schemes for a chateau bedroom in France

1. In the bedroom left, the walls are just as light as the original, but the hue is less peachy and much closer to primary yellow.

2. In the middle bedroom the wall color is exactly the same hue as the quilts. It is much more intense, to a degree that some people would find cloying.

3. The wall paint in the right bedroom looks more mellow and earthy. This is because of a change in tone: the yellow paint color is less saturate, i.e. it has some grayish brown mixed in (similar to the tone of yellow ochre).

B. How To Add Ooomph To Yellow Bedroom Walls:

Here I've used monochrome patterns on the walls to give the room a more 'aristocratic' feel - note how much more opulent the damask looks (5/6):

yellow color schemes for a chateau bedroom in France

Bedroom 6 demonstrates the effect you can achieve by scaling a pattern up. Even though the light/dark contrast is much lower on this wall than in bedrooms 4 or 5, the oversized pattern looks bolder and makes the entire room look grander than it actually is.

Deluxe 'Yellow' Bedroom Color
... Because You're Worth It :-)

Italian bedroom with gilt walls and accessories
'Luxury' bedroom paint colors: Gold & neutrals in Rome, Italy. (© C. Finke)

If you enjoy the happy, positive vibe of yellow but don't really like it as a paint color for the bedroom, you might want to consider gold instead. (It's a very Italian and French thing to do ... check out the page about country French bedroom ideas for some visual inspiration!)

Gold-leafing an accent wall or a ceiling - or just the area around your headboard - will add a wonderful touch of luxury to your nights.

Color Combination Ideas With Yellow:

If you're looking for truly upbeat colors for the bedroom, yellow-plus-neutrals work a treat. It gets more tricky, though, when you want to combine yellow with another "real" color (= another hue from the color wheel), rather than sticking to neutrals.

For example, the complementary of yellow is purple. Both yellow and purple are very popular bedroom colors, but combining them ain't so easy - here's an example. (For more subtle yellow/purple color scheme ideas, check out the page about purple bedrooms.)

deep purple and yellow bedroom
Purple & yellow bedroom. Photo © little orange crow

Yellow/blue is another frequent combination of popular bedroom colors. On the 4-primary color wheel, these two are 'opposing' colors; on the artist color wheel, yellow and blue are two of the three primaries. You'll find more ideas for blue-yellow color schemes in the article about yellow color combinations, as well as on the page about 'hip hotel' colors.