Sea Island Beach House

When designer Meg Braff took on reviving a drab 1960s Sea Island, Georgia, home, her vision was clear: blue, and lots of it! (Here, the front doors are painted Blueberry by Benjamin Moore.) "The house is surrounded on all sides by marsh," she explains. "The low-lying property gives you the feeling that you're being enveloped by the sky, so I wanted to carry that sensation into the decor." But as much as she wanted to make blue the home's central color, she also didn't want it to feel buttoned-up or—worse—predictable. With that in mind, she went room by room with color swatches in hand, studying the light. "The natural light is different in every room, so I wanted to play off of those distinctions," Braff says. The resulting palette is a dynamic spectrum of blues, from vibrant cerulean in the living room to fresh turquoise in the master bedroom. "The key to using varying shades of one color is to make sure they're all the same saturation," notes the designer, who adds that you can identify colors with the same intensity by picking shades that occupy the same position on a paint chip card.