Choosing a Perfect Color Scheme for Your Busy Airbnb

Vacation rental services like Airbnb have forever changed how owners rent out their properties. It’s now easier than ever to promote your space and find eager customers itching to get away for a while. In such a competitive market, though, acquiring a regular stream of renters can be challenging -- and even if your property is popular, it’s on you to keep it clean and beautiful, so prospective patrons continue to choose your place for their trip. Indeed, in addition to customer reviews, price point, and location, appearances are vital when it comes to marketing your vacation rental. After all, most customers rifle through the images you’ve taken of your property before digging into the other details. To make a great first impression, then, you must think carefully about your property’s overall aesthetic, especially its interior design and color scheme.

Let’s go over how to select interior paint colors for your Airbnb rental, so you land the greatest number of customers this vacation season.

How to Pick the Right Airbnb Color

Cling to a Consistent Color Palette

Our eyes are easily overwhelmed when faced with countless clashing colors in dizzying configurations. If you want to show off your space and keep online onlookers interested and engaged, it’s often best to keep your colors simple and consistent. Pick a few colors that work well together and distribute them accordingly across your walls, furniture, and decor. Interior design experts often use a rule of thumb known as the “60/30/10 rule,” which divvies up how much space is allotted for certain types of colors. More specifically, the rule suggests that lighter neutral tones make up 60% of a room, deeper neutrals consume 30%, and brighter, contrasting colors take up that final 10%.

There are, of course, many ways to approach this rule -- you might go with a monochromatic color scheme where you incorporate various shades of green in this 60/30/10 ratio or stick with distinct colors to increase contrast. Whatever the case, consistency, and balance are key. You don’t want any single color to seem out of place or take up too much space.

Make Each Room Its Own Oasis

Every Airbnb property is unique -- some are tiny, one-room spaces primarily meant for shelter and shut-eye, while others are entire houses with full kitchens, bathrooms, a living room, and more. If your property contains several rooms, you must treat each one as its own entity. Even if you’re in love with a particular palette, maintaining the same color scheme in each and every room can be disorienting and turn customers away. It’s perfectly acceptable to incorporate color motifs across different spaces inside your property, but it’s best to give each room its own identity. Doing so makes your place more attractive to prospective renters, making your property appear more dynamic and providing something for everyone.

Establish Broad Appeal

You may own your Airbnb property, but if you’re primarily using it as a vacation rental, you have to distance yourself from it in terms of your own preferences. Simply put, your favorite color palette or decor choices might not appeal to most people who wish to stay at your Airbnb. If you want the most customers, it helps to introduce an interior design that most people will appreciate -- gaudy colors, esoteric decorations, and mismatching furniture might be fine for your tastes but won’t be optimal for the purposes of acquiring the most renters. If you’re not sure which colors currently capture the broadest appeal, reach out to professional interior painting services that have plenty of experience in this area.

Know Your Niche

On the other hand, not every Airbnb is designed for broad appeal. If your property is in an unusual location, constructed in an unconventional manner, or meant to accommodate a certain type of customer, your color and design scheme doesn’t need to fit the mold, so to speak. Instead, these unique properties should be optimized for the specific audience they’re serving. For instance, if your Airbnb is largely meant to be used as studio space for musicians and artists, you might go about painting new walls and ceilings differently than if your space were simply meant for vacation purposes. The more you know your market and can customize your property accordingly, the easier it will be to target the exact types of customers who will naturally be interested in your Airbnb rental.

Use Colors to Create a Local Experience

Since the majority of Airbnb renters are choosing this service to take an affordable vacation, it only makes sense to choose colors that emphasize the tourist/vacation experience. If your property is on the water, consider going with shades of blue for your residential interior painting and incorporating nautical-themed decor and motifs. Or, if your Airbnb rental is in or near a town known with deep historical roots and significance, lean into rustic colors and antique design choices throughout. Properties in wooded areas benefit from nature-inspired color palettes such as rich browns and dark greens. You can also look to local color trends to accentuate your property’s regional appeal. Anyone looking to explore a new region will prioritize properties that add to the local experience in this way.

Consider What Will Look Best in Pictures

The properties that receive the most attention on Airbnb tend to be those with the highest-quality images for online users to browse and share. If you want your rental to be a success, then, you must consider the various factors that go into making it look its very best when photographed. Investing in a quality camera is a great start, but you must also think about angles, lighting, and even the color and finish of your interior house paint. Indeed, certain colors and finishes show up better than others when pictured. It might seem strange to base your paint choices off how photogenic they are, but it’s good to take this seriously. Reach out to painting and photography experts for detailed advice on these matters.

Don’t Exclude Your Exterior

So far, we’ve solely focused on interior color schemes and design choices. However, keep in mind that your property’s exterior appearance matters, too. While prospective renters will likely spend most of their time perusing images of your interior spaces, the first images they’ll see will likely be of your rental’s exterior. On top of that, your exterior will be the first and last thing renters will see upon starting and ending their trip, which plays into their overall feelings of their stay (and therefore your online reputation). With that in mind, keep your exterior clean and bright. And if you decide to update its paint colors, too, consider factors such as local trends, your surroundings, contrast (i.e. accents on trim, doors, shutters, etc.), how well it matches the atmosphere of your interior, and, once again, how it will look when photographed.

Managing an Airbnb and making it successful is easier said than done. That said, making informed color and design choices will elevate your rental property and garner greater interest from potential customers. If you own an Airbnb property in Nashville, Brentwood, and/or Franklin, TN, the experts at Nash Painting can help you optimize its appearance for the upcoming vacation season and beyond.

To learn more about us, our services, and our values, call us at 615-829-6858 today!