The Guide: Choosing the right paint

Perfect match: it pays to find well-suited colours

Colours: Carnaby/Milliner by Crown Paints' Fashion for Walls range

A lick of paint means an instant transformation but also days of umm-ing and aah-ing over endless colour charts, and, often, serious confusion. Before you do anything, upload a photo of your room and use mydeco's Decorate My Photo to play with colours - you'll save the hassle and money of hundreds of tester pots.
Get your budget right: Set a realistic budget, so you don't end up buying cheap brilliant white emulsion for the whole house when you've run out of money. Brilliant white is extremely tiring on the eyes, and doesn't make for a restful home. Expect to budget several hundreds of pounds for a whole house excluding tools.
Live with it:
Paint a 1m x 1m square of hardboard your chosen colour and sit it at various angles around the room. It will indicate how the colour changes with differing amounts of light, at different times of the day. Pick cooler colours for rooms where the light is colder, and sunny, warmer colours in south facing rooms. Avoid colour palettes suited for hot countries - such as Mediterranean or African. They tend to look pastiche and less attractive in our grey British light. Pick muddy or slightly subdued shades, says designer and decorator Allegra Hicks, such as off greens and plums, which suit older, period housing too.

Ecocentric's claypaint is eco-friendly

Eco Chic earthborn Claypaint by Ecocentric

Palettes work:
Overwhelmed by choice? Plump for a single manufacturer's colour palette and stick with it. Marston & Langinger's 48-colour Interior Paint palette is extremely user-friendly. Craig and Rose help you buy paints online by suggesting coordinating hues within collections; and Crown's seasonal fashion shades at Fashion for Walls are presented in super-stylish mini palettes. We also like Oliver Heath's new Eco Chic range for earthBorn from Ecocentric Claypaint Colour - seven environmentally sound use-anywhere hues plus white.

What's your look?
Most fashionable right now are chalky ultra-matt finishes like those from Farrow & Ball and Ecos's new Super-Chalky finish range. These tend to be more expensive but they give a lovely soft, velvety sheen to your walls, are soothing on the eyes, and hide imperfections better than normal emulsion. Avoid using ordinary water-based chalky emulsion paints in bathrooms (and preferably kitchens too). Pick high humidity-friendly/anti-mould paint ranges such as Farrow & Ball's newer Modern Emulsion range, or an eggshell finish, which is harder wearing.
Making wood good:
For woodwork, it's a question of personal preference but gloss is tougher than eggshell or satinwood, both of which are much less shiny. Some interior designers pooh-pooh gloss, although it's making a comeback. But Kelly Hoppen's paint range, for example, only comes in Matt Emulsion and Eggshell.
Right location: A cheap alternative to lino or rubber in bathrooms, painted floors look very chic. Use garage floor paint painted onto a hardboard surface. For uneven/imperfect wooden floorboards, head to Farrow & Ball who do every single one of their colours in floor paint too. 'Mouse's Back' is a best-selling light brown. Use magnetic and chalk board paint (from Crayola by Craig & Rose) on kids' walls, the ends of their beds or large pieces of furniture to create extra play and drawing spaces.
Co-ordination:
If you want paint to match your wallpaper, get it bespoke mixed to match, otherwise your own efforts are likely to be slightly off. Dulux do this in-store via their Colour Mixing System. Ecosalso have a colour matching service.
Leave it to the professionals:
A colour consultant such as Paint & Paper Library's at £100 a room will do the whittling down for you. The Library also runs colour workshops within London, plus its neutral colour palettes are divided into architectural frameworks - once you've chosen your key colour, there are five co-ordinating shades of the same colour to choose from for your woodwork, cornice and ceiling. Plumping for just white ceilings and woodwork is a crime in Aussie owner David Oliver's eyes.
Think about your impact:
If you can afford it choose environment-improving paints like Ecos's Atmosphere Purifying Paint, which absorbs formaldehyde and nasty chemicals from previously painted walls. Eco-friendly paint company that produces low or non-VOC volatile organic compound low odour products such as Ecos, earthBorn or Greenpaints, particularly good if you have children or suffer from allergies. An added advantage is you can also sleep in rooms painted in eco paints the very same day you've splashed on the emulsion, (not so with some traditional paints).