Navy, orange...purple? My living room

Guess what! The ongoing, never ending, time sucking mini renovation of my downstairs area is...actually...finished. I spent the weekend painting the ceiling, walls and window frames, and it is actually done. I have to keep running downstairs to check it is still there.

And now, finally, I can move onto the decorating part! The defining point of the colour scheme for this room will be my Moroccan rug. It's a large orange antique kilim I bought in the Atlas mountains and lugged it around in my backpack (which it almost entirely filled) for a month.

Until now, I haven't had a living room big enough to put it in. But now, I have to come up with a colour scheme.

It looks a little like this...

Except much larger (about 1800x2500?) and it has stripes in softer orange, burnt orange and pale blue. Because the rug is old it is very faded and the colours are more of the washed out, dusty variety than this rug.

Originally, I was thinking orange and brown, like this moodboard I came up with. Then while the rug was packed away I began to think it was more coral than orange really and I got excited by a coral and charcoal grey colour scheme.


Ha, when I pulled out the rug yesterday, it was definately orange. Not coral, burnt orange. Not to mention the fact that I had to move my navy sofa downstairs.

Now the obvious scheme here is bright orange and navy, like this...

Via Style at Home 

As much as I love this room and it's bold summery feel, I wanted something softer. So, back to the old colour wheel I went and came up with purple! Not bright purple, or moody purple..a pretty soft, dusty lilac.

I think it will work well with the dusty orange and navy, and I found the perfect fabric at Spotlight. Will post pictures tomorrow!