Home decorators can look to fashion runways for their color inspiration

The colors that fashion decorators are showing in their annual collections can serve as inspiration for interior design as well. If a color is one that someone is comfortable wearing, it makes sense that they may enjoy seeing it in their home surroundings.

According to the Pantone Color Institute, this spring's designer color choices reflect an exotic touch from far-off places such as Africa, India, Peru and Turkey. The institute has been cataloging colors for 17 years by surveying designers' choices at New York Fashion Week.

From the institute's view, the most prominent colors on runways this year form the basis for home design trends that include honeysuckle and coral rose shades, honey yellow and yellow-green, lavender, and blue shades of ocean blue and blue-green. A neutral span of russet, dusty peach and silver gray also were used prominently.

"The colors designers have chosen for the spring season present an interesting marriage of unexpected warm and cool tones," stated the institute's executive director Leatrice Eiseman in a release. "By cleverly combining complementary colors, those that are opposites on the color wheel, they have created a striking intensity to the palette."

All of that serves as guidance for home decorators who are looking for new color combinations in makeovers that require a new background color as well as complementary hues, or just some ideas they can introduce to brighten their summertime schemes.The runway neutrals, for instance, are in keeping with interior decorators who have turned recently to gray as an alternative to beige tones in wall color. But gray is versatile enough - with a range of blue grays, true grays and those with purple undertones - to be offset with brown-family hues, including the peach and russet shades favored by Pantone.

For home decorators who like to try out a color before committing to it wholesale, there are some simple changes that can be incorporated into their existing décor. Using new colors in soft furnishings such as window treatments, pillows and small area rugs is an inexpensive way to try out a new hue.

Fabric roller shades can be customized to work new colors into a design scheme, and faux wood blinds are available in many finishes that can be coordinated with a room's décor. Woven wood shades are another way to introduce a natural backdrop that will go with any number of new colors.