What

Our annual Colors Contest is a contest for all color lovers, worldwide. In October, we're looking for the most colorful, beautiful room on the planet.

Why

Colorful rooms are the heart of great homes, and adding color is the most affordable way to change a room, but few feel comfortable using it. To inspire confidence and improve homes, we're inviting readers to share their colorful rooms, tips and sources. Brand new in 2009 is our Personal Color Palette, which will allow each entrants to display their own color choices.

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Our 2009 Color Contest Winner

Beth's Kind of Blue Living Room

Hundreds of entries hit our inbox for the 2009 "Room for Color" contest. Our editors picked the top 115 colorful rooms from around the world to share with our readers. Each entry got a chance to gain "thumbs up" votes to make it into the final rounds. Thousands of votes later, the readers favorite room was announced — Beth's Kind of Blue Living Room.

Beth lives in Chicago in a rental apartment and her inspiration was found in a Neko Case concert poster. She writes "I love the blue in this poster I bought last year, so I used a similar shade of blue for the accent wall (just one wall, easy enough to repaint when we have to move out). " And she has wise advice for next years entrants — "Don't sweat it: I actually painted this wall what I thought was a lovely, barely green deep sea blue, but it ended being a vivid, intense dark teal that looked absolutely awful. So I painted over it. Just try it out and see if you like it: it's just paint."

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Division Winners

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All Entries

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