Painting our walls was always off-limits while we lived in rentals because Kay is… how can I say it, super Swiss, so he was always terrified of doing anything to endanger our deposit. Considering that our deposit was around 5500CHF ($6000), it was a big deal and I didn’t push the issue because I also wanted to get all that money back some day. This meant no nail holes and no paint.

When we lived in Winterthur and Kay was furnishing what started out as his own flat, he bought black furniture to go in the all-white flat and red curtains for a very Swiss red/black/white decor. That flat was the extreme of the “clean Swiss look”. It had stark white tile, white walls and white cabinets. He didn’t hang any pictures up during his entire time there.

When we moved to Zürich together, we had the lovely terracotta flooring and wooden beams throughout the ceiling, so the flat had enough color that I didn’t feel like I was being suffocated in white and he even nailed one hole in the wall for a painting from Paris. But now that we have moved again to a place with a little less character than our charming attic flat, I’m really looking forward to finally being “allowed” to paint some color onto the walls!

For what seems like forever, I’ve been dreaming of a bright red wall like I found on Pinterest:

(Via  plentyofcolour.com.)

See how nice it would look in reality below? And you can buy so many red home decor items in Switzerland. Decorating = done.

But over the year Kay went to visit a friend who did some lime green in the kitchen and ever since then he’s been dreaming of bright lime green in the kitchen, which in my mind just wouldn’t go with the red in the living room… but then I found this inspiration picture and I’m just not sure. What do you think? Too Christmassy?

(Via Houzz)

Kay seemed pretty set on this lime green idea. “So fresh!” he would say, so I started thinking of colors that would go better with lime green than red and remembered how much I like purple and green mixes. At first Kay thought this sounded super crazy… so I needed to compile a bunch of inspiration pictures before he warmed up to the idea of painting anything purple in our house.

(1/2: Via Houzz  3. Via Houzz 4.Via Houzz  5. Via 6. Via New England Home  7.Via Room Decorating Ideas 8. Via Apartment Therapy 9. Via Mummy’s Little Dreams 10. Via Deviantart 11. Via Houzz 12. Via Hammonds 13. Via Houzz)

Kay still wanted to see it on our walls via Photoshop, so I mocked up the red version earlier and this version below to give him an idea.

We both really liked the way the green and purple accent walls will interact with each other from the kitchen and there will still be plenty of Swiss white walls, so no big paint job (saves costs!) and we will still be able to use Kay’s mood lighting from Philips to play around with color in the living room.

Who comes up with the color choices in your household?