The sienna pigment was a favorite of this cave painters who tracked statistics in iron oxide and manganese oxide on walls deep underground. Raw sienna is just a yellowish-brown color that if heated, turns reddish-brown, and also is called burnt sienna. Both shades are powerful, earthy tones which may punctuate or dominate decor, based on how you use them. If you’ve got a sienna-colored bedspread, choose wall color carefully to create a restful ambiance in the room.
Sophisticated Swamp
Raw sienna is brownish with a lot of yellow in it. A bedspread of raw sienna corduroy may look muddy in a white or beige area, but washed-out chartreuse walls may look after that. The yellow-green wall color is a naturalist’s dream, so add touches from nature to decorate the space Audubon-style. A botanical rug on the hardwood plank floors pulls greens and browns together. A cypress tree-stump bedside table carries an oil-rubbed bronze canopy base topped with a flamingo-pink parchment shade. Toss hibiscus, peony and flamingo-pink pillows on the sienna bedspread and line pastel toast drapes in pink to cast a slight rosy tint to the room.
Earthy to Elegant
The bedspread is burnt-sienna damask, and the plush carpet is a wealthy barn red — so deep it’s a bit of garnet within it. The walls have been silvery gray. Such powerful color in the bedding and carpeting requires a foil, but the offsetting wall color has to hold its own to balance the space. A lightly gleaming silvered gray on the walls is as luxurious as silk, lifting the deep, rustic colors from earthy to refined. This really is a bedroom which may encourage a liver-red glazed pottery lamp base with a charcoal raw silk shade, pewter or pale grey raw silk drapes and whisper-pale silvered-gray sheets. Find somewhere to inject a hint of jade — in a piece of wall art, a Chinese fu dog sculpture, throw cushions or a reduced, painted seat at the foot of the bed.
Cafe au Lait
With a chenille bedspread of burnt sienna, create the floors, ceiling, trim and walls creamy vanilla to create a delicious bedroom getaway. Expand these java colors with a highboy dresser in rich woods of bubinga, pau rosa, American walnut or cocobolo. Toss a braided rug in hues of sienna and light-to-dark browns near the bed, and keep the appearance expansive with mainly antique white and vanilla everywhere else but on the tortoise shell bamboo blinds. A single Le Corbusier seat in tobacco leather allows you sit to wear your shoes before you go from the espresso bar in the kitchen.
Sienna and Honey
A patterned bedspread in combined raw and burnt sienna tends toward the warm palette, and golds with rare touches of cinnabar match it handsomely. Golden honey-cream walls are sunny with no yellowish, and act as a unifying canvas for various colors in the room. Cover the rest of the bed in unbleached linen and natural Egyptian cotton shams, light sheets and blankets. A stiff silk-taffeta gathered brassy-gold bed skirt makes a luxurious oasis of this bed. Honey-colored antique hardwood dressers contrary to the lighter walls mix in and sprinkle the warm sienna tones of this bedspread. Carved cinnabar boxes on the dresser and bedside table, and cinnabar frames around wall artwork, present random spikes of color in the room.