Live With Color Before You Buy
When shopping for upholstery fabric, furniture finishes, window treatments or rugs, always ask for a sample to take home to see in the space you are decorating. Then leave it in the room for a couple of days and see what the color looks like in the different kinds of lighting used in that space. Pay careful attention to how the samples look during the times when the room will be used the most.

If the room is used most often at night, after everyone is home from work and school (under the "artificial" light of lamps), check out the color during the late afternoon and evening hours. If the room is used during the day, when there is an abundance of natural sunlight, check out the colors during the morning and early afternoon hours.

The direction the room's windows face (where the natural light is coming from) will also impact how a color appears in the room. Dark colors tend to look darker in rooms with northern exposures. You may want to lighten the color values of your choices a bit to reflect this in such spaces. The opposite is true for rooms with southern exposures: colors appear lighter.