25 Playful Homes Splashed With Vibrant Pops of Yellow
These living spaces create a bright and joyful environment by getting adventurous with color.
The color yellow is associated with happiness and sunshine. So, naturally, adding bursts of the bright shade to an interior can do wonders for illuminating the area and evoking a radiant and energetic atmosphere. Take a peek at these 25 spaces that come to life with the color yellow.
A Creative Dreamworld Complete With Neon Rooms and a Tropical Garden
Texan artist Tim Stokes and French architect Nathalie Wolberg undertook a hands-on renovation of an old, 6,000-square-foot warehouse in Antwerp, Belgium. The expansive live/work space includes individual studios for the husband and wife. Nathalie painstakingly mixed and tested the paint for the mustard-yellow walls herself—15 times—to match the hue of a Kvadrat textile.
Photo: Tim Van de Velde
O’Neill Rose Architects designed a multigenerational compound in Queens, New York, for a client who’d been living with his mother, brother, and sister-in-law under one roof. The architects tried to honor the personality of each inhabitant’s space by incorporating distinct details, such as the bright yellow and purple paints that add vibrancy to the desk area in the young daughter’s room.
Photo: Michael Moran
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Filmmaker Laura Purdy worked with architect Linda Taalman and landscape designer Laura Cooper to brainstorm the renovation of the midcentury house where she and her husband, Juan Devis, live with their children in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood. The family’s eclectic collections of art and personal artifacts share space with flashes of pattern. Throughout the exterior and interior, the raked-stucco walls in pink and yellow were inspired by architect Luis Barragán’s Mexican modernism.
Photo: Lisa Romerein
Spanish firm Gon Architects and designer Ana Torres renovated this 69-foot-long Madrid flat to include a yellow-tiled bathroom, salmon-hued bedroom reading nook, and bright-blue kitchen stand. The home’s colorful corners are tied together by white passages and subtle wood floors.
Photo by Imagen Subliminal
Local architect Sophie Dries combined two Haussmann apartments in Paris’s Marais district to create a larger, open space for a young family. Impactful paint colors and contemporary art counterbalance the delicate architecture and vintage furnishings throughout the home. In the children’s playroom, a piece by JonOne hangs alongside a vintage map on an acidic yellow wall.
Photo by Stephan Julliard
The 323-square-foot BYG House in Spain updates Paleolithic dwelling typology with bold colors and multifunctional spaces. Madrid-based Gon Architects divided the layout into three distinct spaces designated by the colors teal, yellow, and off-white.
Photo by Imagen Subliminal
Mark Fekete and Viviana de Loera, cofounders of interdisciplinary design firm MARK + VIVI, took on the challenge of transforming an 1880 Montreal residence into their dream home. "I always wanted to have my very own yellow brick road," says Viviana, whose favorite part of the dwelling is the playful staircase. The original stairs and handrail were preserved in the renovation.
Photo: Adrien Williams
Lisbeth Juul and Laust Nørgaard designed and built the 860-square-foot floating home where they live with their daughter in Copenhagen Harbour. The plywood-paneled interior includes five distinct spaces—a hall, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen-dining-living area, and terrace. In the bathroom, the home’s whitish-gray epoxy floor transitions to submarine yellow. A ladder, which serves as a towel rack, was sourced from the Danish Emergency Management Agency.
Photo: Anders Hviid
Vine Architecture Studio reimagined a top-floor East London apartment to include a vibrant yellow spiral staircase that links the upper and the lower terrace. "The stair is minimal yet carefully detailed," says architect Rory Pennant-Rea. "We designed it to be seen as an external sculptural element."
Photo by Nicholas Worley
Aaron and Yuka Ruell tasked Portland, Oregon-based firm Jessica Helgerson Interior Design with remodeling their family residence, which was originally designed by local architect William Fletcher in 1959. "It was about taking cues from midcentury design, but also bringing in modern pieces that fit," says designer and project manager Emily Knudsen Leland. In the office, existing track lighting illuminates cabinetry covered in Lemon Bar by Miller Paint.
Photo: Grant Harder
Architect Michelle Linden, co-owner and principal designer of Atelier Drome, overhauled the 1902 residence in Seattle where she and her husband had been living for four years. The updated sunroom and TV lounge—formerly a second bedroom—is Michelle’s favorite space in the home. The designer opened the ceiling to expose the trusses and added skylights, then painted with a bright yellow color inspired by a Luis Barragán home.
Photo by Lisa Town
Rick Moreland and his wife, Susan, worked with architectural designer Michael Hughes to build their 2,250-square-foot, two-story shotgun house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "We took Southern inspirations and translated them into a modern aesthetic," Hughes says. A yellow accent wall and high ceilings enhance the lightness of the primary living space.
Photo: João Canziani
Portland-based In Situ Architecture constructed this 2,700-square-foot, energy-efficient family home. The material palette is designed to age gracefully, featuring stained cedar siding and bright interiors with pops of primary colors throughout. A custom, yellow-painted reading nook is situated near a floor-to-ceiling sliding door that offers direct access to the patio and yard.
Photo by Built Photo
Designed by London-based practice Russian For Fish, this remodeled Victorian features a nearly all-yellow kitchen, with a monochromatic scheme that extends across the cabinetry and ceiling.
Photo by Peter Landers
John Klopf of Klopf Architecture worked with Outer Space Landscape Architecture, Sezen & Moon Structural Engineering, and Flegel’s Construction Co. to refresh a double gable Eichler home in Mountain View, California. The four-bedroom, two-bathroom house is wrapped with vertical western red cedar, which the architects selected because of its low-VOC stain. The front door is painted in a bright yellow shade, which adds a welcoming accent to the facade.
Photo by Mariko Reed
When Jane Macrae, founder of Nine Muses Design, was designing a family home for clients in the coastal town of Point Lonsdale in Victoria, Australia, the inspiration came from pop star Pink’s hit song, "The FUN House." The result is a colorful home divided into three zones—one for the parents, one for the children, and a central pavilion where the family can come together. In the kids’ bathroom, yellow tiles delineate each boy’s personal area. The Andy Warhol pixelated tiles by Dune were used sparingly for impact.
Photo by Matthew Gudykunst
Designed and developed by award-winning architectural designer Jennifer Bonner, Haus Gables is one of only a few residences in the United States made of cross-laminated timber (CLT). Located in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, the 2,200-square-foot home challenges traditional domestic interiors through materiality, color, and form.
Photo by NAARO
Los Angeles–based design firm ORA built this family home in the Mar Vista suburb with two separate buildings: a long, linear home "shaped like a boomerang," and a bright-red accessory dwelling unit. In the main house, a soothing material palette composed of concrete floors, white walls, and wood is punctuated by spots of color, such as the teal tile backsplash and salmon-toned cabinet in the kitchen, or the sunshine-yellow vanity in one of the bathrooms.
Photo by Eric Staudenmaier
Architect Fred Fisher of Frederick Fisher and Partners built the Ojai, California, residence where he lives with his wife, Jennie, and their two sons, Henry and Eugene. The architect’s love of light and texture are evident throughout the home, from the rusted Cor-Ten steel exterior to the double-height living room and kitchen with its poured-concrete floor. At the entrance, the home’s sunny vestibule features a vibrant yellow door.
Photo by Tim Street-Porter
Architects Fumio Hirakawa and Marina Topunova of 24d-Studio turned a 35-year-old post-and-beam home in Kobe, Japan, into a live/work space. The facade features a yellow balcony that the architects say is intended to spark a smile and make a statement against the "monotonous and dull color palette" of traditional Japanese neighborhoods.
Photo by Kei Sugino
After architect Don Dimster and his filmmaker brother, Dennis, purchased a 40-by-120-foot lot in Venice, California, the duo built two interconnected three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath homes. The primary bathroom sits deep in the plan but has three sources of natural light—a yellow-painted skylight, small window, and translucent glass wall shared with the kitchen.
Photo: Eric Staudenmaier
London-based Practice Architecture incorporated hemp into the exterior cladding of a three-bedroom prefab farmhouse located on Margent Farm, a research and development facility in the Cambridgeshire region specializing in bioplastics made of hemp and flax. The bright-yellow cabinets are a playful touch in the otherwise neutral-toned space.
Photo by Oskar Proctor
Architect Samuel Gonçalves, founder of the Porto-based architecture firm SUMMARY, put his framework for building modular, concrete structures to the test for a mixed-use development in the foothills of Portugal’s Serra da Estrela mountains. While the ground floor of the building was built with simple, prefabricated slabs and structural panels, the first-floor units are all products of the architect’s Gomos System. Each individual 485-square-foot "cabin" comprises three-and-a-half modules joined together. In contrast to the building’s gray exterior, the interiors feature bright pops of color, from pastel blues to vibrant yellows.
Photo by Fernando Guerra | FG+SG
Singapore-based iterior designer Ponnie Tan of EightyTwo infused a local apartment with a striking scheme that borrows from Wes Anderson’s oeuvre. The principal bathroom features a sunflower yellow–tiled shower. In the the living room, canary-yellow walls match a sofa of the same color.
Photo by SEECK Photography
Lookofsky Architecture revived a 850-square-foot, 1920s apartment in Stockholm’s Södermalm neighborhood with egg yolk-yellow accents and a series of multifunctional, storage walls. The property had not been renovated since the ’70s, so the apartment was restored and reorganized to include built-in cabinetry and a seating nook.
Courtesy of Mattias Hamrén with styling by Hanna Tunemar
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