How Color Transforms a Design: Ikea Side Table

Ikea: known for its lifestyle enhancing, low-priced furniture that allows their customers to put a personal touch on any room. Personally, I find shopping at Ikea to be a lot of fun (but maybe that's just the designer in me…). They have a variety of furniture and home accessories that can update, renovate, decorate, and personalize. Ikea even puts together room samples so that the work is done for you: just select a room you like, find the furniture in the warehouse, add a little elbow grease and paint, and viola! My favorite part of Ikea, though, is its ability to offer a wide variety of furniture that can be easily matched to other products. How do they do this? Color, of course! Every table, bookshelf, and bed stand comes in a variety of colors that can be mixed and matched. The beauty of these pieces is that they are very similar to one another, but they give a room a completely different feel.

Take this table: the left in "White" and the right in "Walnut Effect"

Furniture can completely change the feel of a room. White furniture makes a room look sleek and futuristic. White can also have a clean and sterile feeling, which is probably why it is used in hospitals. I would venture to say that white is much younger feeling: there is no aged look to a clean white table. Wood furniture, however, makes a room feel much cozier and homier. Rather than feeling hard and stale, a wood table can make the room feel warm. A wood table can also look beautiful when it is a little rugged, with scratches or marks on the surface. A white table with scratches or stains usually just looks dirty and un-taken care of. 

One difference that is notable with these two tables is the color combinations that are available with each. White can be paired with almost anything: a white table can work in a white room, to complete an aesthetic, but white can also fit into a room with many colors. White can work with any color of the rainbow, to create a fresh accompaniment. Wood colored, however, has a limited usage. Wood looks good with cooler colors, like green and blue, but can have an unpleasing aesthetic when paired with red or orange. Wood also does not match all other wood: a warmer honey-colored wood cannot always be paired with a darker maple. Woods can look especially bad if they are almost the same color, but just a little off (similar to how black shirts and black pants do not always match). In all, wood is decidedly less neutral than white. 

I actually own this table, in the red version. The red is very energetic and young feeling, and brightens up any room it's in. It definitely lacks the sleek look of the white, and the homey, mature feeling of the wood version. However, in my drab dorm room, the little red table brightens up the off-white walls and blue-grey carpeting. I have a feeling that this little table will continue to be an easy way to brighten up any of my rooms in the future!