One living room, four looks with Dulux Colour of the Year 2027

The living room today is a hard-working space. It’s where we spend most of our leisure time – relaxing, reading, watching TV – but it’s also where we entertain friends and family. We want this multipurpose room to feel warm, comfortable and inviting, whatever we’re using it for.

Our Colour of the Year Soulful Sage™ makes a great starting point for any decorative living room scheme. Warm, cleansing and uplifting, it can brighten the mood of the darkest space and bring an on-trend look to your home – whether it’s traditional or contemporary. Used on its own, Soulful Sage™ can create an elegant and versatile backdrop for any interior style – Scandinavian, Japandi or modern classic, for example. Combined with the shades in Dulux's new colour stories – Glow, Light and Lift, it offers limitless potential for creating a living room look you’ll love.

Dulux ready-made colour stories make things easy. Once you’ve picked your favourite, just follow this simple guidance to combine colours successfully: use the lighter shades as your base and the more saturated tones as accents.

Whether you’re after a cosy colour scheme or something pared back and sophisticated, read on for living room paint colour ideas that will transform your home.

What lies behind Dulux colour stories? Wide-ranging research, global trend monitoring and years of colour expertise. For 2027, Dulux colour experts have designed three on-trend palettes that offer you ingenious and practical colour ideas for your home. These easy-to-use combinations – all of which include Dulux Colour of the Year – offer you a shortcut to three different moods.

This year, the colour stories focus on light tones. These are perfect to use as base colours, with the additional darker shades included to help you add personality and contrast. It’s all about giving you the tools to create a colour scheme that works for you and that can make you, and your home, feel lighter and brighter.

When so much of life is lived online, we want our homes to be personal, tangible spaces where we can feel rooted and at ease. Dulux Glow colour story is responding to this need with a palette of warm tones that are familiar and comforting.

Based on natural, earthy shades, Glow paint colours work brilliantly in a living room. They can bring warmth and comfort even to a North-facing room at the same time as maximising the sunlight.

Here, light terracotta has been used for the walls and ceiling to give a cosy, cocooning effect, while a cabinet painted in Colour of the Year 2027 Soulful Sage™ adds a freshening dash of green.

How to master a cosy look:

1. Use colour on walls, ceilings and woodwork to get that wraparound effect
2. Incorporate soft green Soulful Sage™ for a harmonious colour contrast
3. Add furnishings in warm, natural materials to complete the look

A simple, pared-back colour scheme can turn your living room into the perfect healing retreat when life gets on top of you. Dulux Light colour story offers a palette of gentle tones that can help reduce visual clutter and quieten the atmosphere to give you space to think.

This light, neutral colour scheme works well with many contemporary interior styles – particularly those that favour a simple, natural look, such as Japandi, Scandi or Nordic designs.

Here, two grey-browns create an elegant split wall effect, while Soulful Sage™ adds a touch of natural brightness at the doorway. Painted the same colour as the wall around it, the cabinet almost disappears – a clever way of further simplifying the décor.

How to create this healing atmosphere:

1. Use light, natural neutrals as your base colours
2. Add a touch of Soulful Sage™ to bring calming colour
3. Paint furniture in the same colour as the walls to reduce visual clutter

Home is the perfect place to indulge our creativity but we need inspiring spaces to spark our imaginations. Dulux Lift colour story offers a collection of upbeat tones and neutrals that can be combined with Soulful Sage™ to create any number of uplifting colour schemes.

Yellowy ochre, soft pink, sage green – this on-trend colour combination feels fresh, appealing and unexpected. Whether you’re after a mid-century look, boho chic or just want to do your own thing, these colours will work brilliantly in the background.

Upbeat colour can make any living room feel positive and light-hearted. And why not use it in unexpected places? Here, the main walls have been painted in a soft, neutral clay, with bolder colour kept for the ceiling and the feature wall – painted in Dulux Colour of the Year Soulful Sage™. A darker, warm green also adds eye-catching contrast at the doorway.

Finished with curvy furniture and colourful details, this is a living room that’s bound to lift your spirits.

How to get the light-hearted look:

1. Set bold, upbeat tones against neutrals to lift the feel of a room
2. Try a painted ceiling for a surprise burst of colour overhead
3. Mix and match colourful and curvy furniture to add personality to the space

The soft, greyed-off greens of nature have a secret power: they can be warm, cleansing and ethereal at the same time. We’ve picked Soulful Sage™ as our Colour of the Year for 2027 because it feels the most sensory of them all. Associated with wise thoughts, healing herbs and flashes of inspiration, it’s the perfect colour to boost your mood and help you ‘live lightly’.

Soulful Sage™ is also a very versatile shade – as happy supporting other colours as playing the central role in a paint scheme. Here, it has been used for a clever colour-drench effect – with walls, ceiling and furniture all painted in this elegant shade (discover how to achieve a colour drench). As well as making for a contemporary, on-trend look, this wraparound colour technique is a brilliant way of bringing all the different elements of a room together.

Our Colour of the Year 2027 also sets off natural sunlight to great effect. Subtly changing in tone depending on the time of day and where it’s used, it can magically give you an ever-changing landscape of colour.

To recreate wraparound green:

1. Use Soulful Sage™ for all the painted surfaces in your living room. Dulux have easy-to-use options for every wall and surface. Find the best products for your project.
2. Add furnishings and accessories in natural colours and textures
3. Bring in some greenery – living fragments of the world outside, plants connect us straight back to nature

Find out how to transform every room in your home with our Colour of the Year 2027 and discover the ingenious double-drenching design technique to give any room a colour boost.