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You saw a picture recently of a black and teal living room and fell in love. Maybe you’ve seen several living rooms like this, and you can’t wait to make your own. Black and teal are intense colors, so you need to use them carefully to design a balanced and attractive living room. Check out some of these black and teal living room ideas to design a bold and modern living room.


1) Black Curtains

When decorating with dark colors, you have to be careful not to use too much or a dark color on a large surface. Large areas of darker colors make a room look smaller and can be depressing. Therefore, you don’t want your walls to be black. Instead, try teal walls with black curtains like these. While the curtains are fairly large, they’ll stand out against the teal walls without looking too dark since the walls are much larger than the curtains.

2) DIY Print Your Own Decor

Teal and black is a very specific color scheme, so you don’t want much of any other colors that may interfere with it. One of the hardest parts of finding teal and black decor is getting artwork that doesn’t clash with the color scheme. If you don’t like the selection of teal and black prints available, think about printing your own decor. You can create abstract art pieces using this color code for teal instead of going by sight since colors look different in print versus on a computer screen. Similarly, make sure to use CMYK instead of RGB.

3) DIY Worn Leather Accent Wall

Teal and black are both common colors to dye leather, and both look good with a leathered texture. Think about making a teal accent wall or painting all your walls teal with a worn leather look like the one demonstrated in this video by Paintsmiths South Africa. This wall will look subtly different from a solid wall and give texture and life to the room. It’ll also lighten the teal a little bit to make the room feel more open.

4) DIY Oversized Wall Art

Teal and black is a naturally bold color scheme. Black is a powerful color since it’s a complete absence of light, while teal is generally a bold and vibrant color. This means that your other furniture and decorations should be bold, too. You can use these instructions to make big, bold wall art for a low cost since printing or buying wall art is generally pretty expensive. Choose teal and black art or print dramatic grayscale pieces.

5) Subtle Touches

If you don’t want your teal and black room to be overwhelming, maybe you don’t want to go with teal walls and black furniture. Instead, add subtle touches of both colors. After all, both colors are bold and intense, so smaller touches will have a big impact without being blinding. Try using throw pillows and decorations throughout the room to draw the eye from one piece to another, as Belmont Design Group did in this post. By putting two teal decorations of the same shade on opposite sides of the room, you encourage people to look around the entire room.

6) Dramatic Wall Art

Teal and black is a dramatic choice, and your wall art should be dramatic, too. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be big, though large art can help break up big swathes of dark colors if needed. Get art that shows the extreme contrast of teal and black, like this canvass with a vibrant teal rose and black and gray background. Make sure that the shade of the rose matches at least somewhat with your other teal decor.

7) Black Furniture

Since black is an extremely dark color, you won’t want black walls. Instead, you can paint your walls teal or a lighter color and use black for smaller items like furniture. Instead of hunting for pieces of all black furniture, you can use paint like this chalk paint from Amazon to turn your furniture black. You’ll still need to reupholster your couch and other soft furniture, if you have a lot of it, but if you have enough wood furniture, you can just paint the wood furniture black and get teal covers for your other furniture.

8) LED Lights

LED lights are a unique way to create any color scheme. People often think about what color to paint walls or what furniture and wall art to choose, but it’s easy to forget that lights can be part of your decor. Get LED lights and use the guide in this video to set color-changing lights to stay teal all the time. You can then get black and white furniture and make it look teal using lights, instead of replacing all your furniture with difficult-to-find teal furnishings.

9) Subtle Wall Art

Since teal and black are already intense colors, it doesn’t take much to call attention to them. Instead of filling the room with a lot of teal furnishings and art, get pieces of art like this that are mostly black, but have subtle hints of teal. The splash of color on the otherwise colorless canvass will draw attention, just as small bits of teal here and there in your living room will draw attention. This will work best if you have white walls with black and teal accents throughout the room.

10) Shades of Grey

While the contrast of using only black against teal may seem like the most dramatic way to use the colors, you can actually create a highly dramatic effect by adding some shading in between. In this photograph, the artist mixed dark grays and mottled effects into the black and teal decor, creating a stunning decorating scheme with a combination of deep grey, black, teal, and brown. The mottled dark grey makes one think of storm clouds and gives the room the ambiance of an approaching storm.

11) Black Bohemian Rug

Bohemian style includes deep earth tones combined with vibrant colors, so the black and teal color scheme lends itself to this style. You can find plenty of patterned rugs and other bohemian style things in black or teal, so get black rugs with Bohemian designs like this one from Amazon. The white in the pattern helps break up the black and keep it from being too dark, but it still provides deep contrast to any teal decorations you’ll have.

12) Geometric Patterns

Geometric patterns are ideal for showing off contrast since they allow you to see both colors side-by-side. In a black and teal room, they also help keep either color from overwhelming the other and keep the room from seeming too dark if you have too much black in it. You can follow this video by Eleni Nicolo to learn how to make a geometric pattern. This pattern is well suited to the color scheme since you can use black to outline teal designs on the walls.

13) Black Scarf Valance

Since black is a dark color, you want to be careful about how you use it. Too much black in a small room can make it feel claustrophobic, and black walls are difficult to paint over if you change your mind about them later. Instead of painting with black, use a lighter color like teal of white for the walls and add black accents like a scarf valance. A black scarf valance like this one from Walmart is an excellent way to contrast teal walls because it isn’t symmetrical, causing it to catch people’s attention.

14) Turquoise

One of the great things about different types of blue like teal is that blues mix well. You can have several shades and tones of blue without it looking strange. Think about including some turquoise decorations like this rug from Amazon. While this blue, grey, and black rug doesn’t have any teal in it, it’ll go with teal and black decorations and provide a few different blues to keep the color scheme from being two-dimensional.

15) Black and White

Just because you’re focused on the teal and black aspects of your color scheme doesn’t mean the entire room has to be teal and black. In fact, you’ll benefit greatly from using a combination of other colors, with teal and black as accents. This way, you can make sure the teal and black are the focal points and create a more tasteful room. Try making a white and black room with teal accents, like the gorgeous and bold room shown in this picture.


How do you plan to use teal and black in your living room? Did we miss any ideas that interest you? Let us know in the comments below.


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