French Country Style Design Elements

Today I wanted to share some French Country Design elements.  When building and/or decorating a home, one of the first things to consider is color palette.  In French Country design the colors are softer. Choose colors that are found in nature, think Provence.  For example, you can use soft blues and greens  like the fields, sea and sky.  There's also the yellow, red and gold palette taken from the colors of french flowers or soft lavenders/blues, inspired by the lavender fields.  I have chosen to go with the bluish/green tones - which will be soft aqua shades, combined with whites/creams/neutrals and brown shades.

I found this really cool tool by Sherwin Williams called...
Let's Chip It

You can add it to your toolbar and whenever you see an image that inspires you, just click on the chip it icon and scroll over the picture.  It will create a paint chipcard for you from that image like I'm showing here below.  You can see the color names which makes it easy to take to their store and select those colors.   
So for my color scheme - I would select colors more on the left.

Another element to consider, for French Country Style, is pattern.  Some of the more common patterns in French Country design are toile, landscapes, birds, animals and flowers.  Other pattern elements might be gingham, ticking, checked, the French Fleur, and damask.  

As far as furniture pieces go - think Rustic Formal.  Those two contrasting words go together so well in French Country Style.  You can aquire pieces that are new, but made to look old or you can go to flea markets etc to find great French antiques.  I prefer a mix of old and new pieces.  Anything with fabric must be new for me or at least totally cleaned and recovered.

Today's French Country Cozy:

Today's cozy is a simple loose herbal french floral tea with some French Orange blossom honey to sweeten it.  I found this honey at TJMaxx for 3.99.  Pretty crazy right?  But that's the whole point to a French Country Cozy.  We can all bring a little bit of the Romance of France inexpensively into our homes. So It's tea time- C'est l'heure du thé!