Image via Pinterest

Gray is the perfect neutral, but it can feel cold and lifeless on it’s own.  Yellow is cheerful and bright, but it can also seem like you decorated with your kids crayons when paired with other bight colors.  However, combine the two and you have a perfectly simple, yet strikingly sophisticated, color scheme.

Image via Sow Kindness, Gather Love

See what I mean?  That room is nothing but gray, except for two yellow pillows, a vase, and a few bright yellow chrysanthemums.  Imagine how blah that room would be without them!

Image via It's a Bride's Life

This balancing act works beautifully with clothing too.  Have a plain grey suit?  Wear a yellow blouse under it, or accessorize with a yellow purse.  A grey dress could go from blah to brilliant with the addition of a yellow scarf or belt.  The trick is to keep the yellow to about 30% or less of the overall color, whether it is an outfit or a room.

Image via Etsy

Why do I bring this up?  I’m currently working on a bathroom remodel for a client, and after putting together the tile and countertop materials, I realized that, with one exception, I still had nothing but white and gray.  The exception was a tiny bit of golden yellow in the glass tile for the backsplash.  So I started digging around my samples, and came up with a matching butter yellow liner tile that I could use to frame the glass tile as an accent on the shower walls.  But it still wasn’t quite enough.  So after a little more looking around, I realized that the floor tile was available in the same butter yellow, as well as the gray I had already chosen.  Voila!  Now we are creating a “rug” from the yellow floor tile to place in front to the shower.   It is all about the balance.

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So how about you?   Have you ever tried this combination before?  Would you want to?

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel