The Morandi collection brings a variety of pastel colours and textures to porcelain tiles.
The retro-look trend and pastel colours are coming back in style. Kaolin offers a unique collection of colours, ranging from mint and coral to pearl and blue, combined with different textures that not only provide the latest trends, but also truly unique finishes. The combinations are endless.
Colour is a funny thing in the Australian interior design world. It’s a love hate relationship.
When you walk into a luxury hotel, they don’t just throw a few pops of coloured cushions on the lobby chairs and be done with it. Their interiors are curated to create environments and experiences. We experience life though texture and colour.
Colour evokes emotion: peace, energy, anger, joy, power, calm etc. So why do Australians paint their walls white all the time? It’s simple, we view white as clean and neutral. That white goes with everything and highlights the architecture. White is easy. White makes rooms appear bigger. Real Estate Agents love white as it appears to makes a house more appealing with it’s a blank canvas. We forget that white is also lacking emotion. Pure or clean are not emotions. White doesn’t excite joy, nor a sense of calm.
Transitioning from white, grey hues tends to be the next step forward. A little more thought provoking and interesting, grey symbolises balance. It is also the colour of concrete and rock, with feeling of being raw and cold. Designers love grey as is a great colour to add to any environment that needs a bit of sophistication but still maintaining a neutral palette with such a broad spectrum of light and dark shades. Grey however is no supplement to colour to excite our love of interiors and is commonly overused in Australian design and architecture.
So how can we use colour in our buildings? Through mood. Mood is key to understanding what interior environment you are trying to create. Hotels are one of the best examples of ‘environmental colour’ within interior design. Bold yet refined. Tailored yet homey. Lobbies are created with double story walls of bright coloured marble that empower the environment or they may have solid timber cubes that appear as if nature made them that way wrapping the reception counter.
When we add a colour in our interiors, more often than not we select the colour blue. It’s peaceful, calm and serene. The right hue of blue can create excitement, personality, and more than anything, blue is not considered a “trend” colour (well not at the moment anyway). Its stable. Its timeless. And most importantly its plays on our Australian love of the sea and the outdoors.
The best and most memorable environments we experience are not those bathed in white or grey, but ones which have emotion, excitement and colour. If we can start to embrace colour further, we might just be surprised and find that we enjoy the spaces we live in even more.
