the joy of colour

Ingrid Fetell Lee asks why we are afraid to have more colour in our homes?

We wear bright clothes on holiday, paint children’s rooms in blue, pink or yellow and celebrate festive occasions with red or green, so why do we so often pick bland shades when it comes to decorating our homes? In her new book, leading industrial designer Ingrid Fetell Lee examines the part colour can play in making our lives more joyful

Few people would name their favourite colour as beige, but our homes are often cloaked in neutral tones. Why is there such a gap? “Chromophobia” was the answer I received from colour-loving architects Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat. “People are afraid of colour,” Stamberg told me. “It’s the fear of of making a mistake,” Aferiat said, “and having to live with it.” The difference between energetic, joyful colours and more sombre hues has to do with how pure and how bright the pigments are. Designers use the terms “saturation” and “lightness”: a saturated colour is its purest version. The truest blue and the sunniest yellow are strong and intense. To desaturate colours, you add grey. Spring green becomes olive; cerulean becomes slate. Beige is a desaturated yellow and grey is the ultimate desaturated colour. Desaturated colours can be useful as part of a colour scheme, but if you look around and all you see are greys and khakis and beiges, then your surroundings are pretty drab.

The lightness of a colour has to do with how much white or black is mixed into it. White reflects light, while black absorbs it. Light pink and sky blue are more energising than burgundy and navy because they reflect more light, while dark, desaturated colours absorb light, bringing down the energy in a space. We dismiss colour as frivolous, prizing neutral hues as a mark of mature taste. I recently met a woman who told me that she loves colour, but she only feels comfortable using it in her child’s room, not in the rest of the house. Could our world be much more colourful if only people weren’t afraid of looking foolish?

People are unconsciously attracted to the brightest spots: if a space feels dead, a powerful remedy is to create focal points of light. A sofa by the fireplace, a window seat, a dining table bathed in the warm light of a pendant lamp: these places are always alive because we, like moths, cannot resist the light.

The colour-loving architects Stamberg and Aferiat designed a house on Long Island. They added a front door in bright yellow. From the outside, the door is a cheery beacon, but from the inside, the effect is totally different. The door acts like its own light source. The white walls pull the colour into the centre of the home. It takes the invisible light and turns it golden.

If you want a brighter, more energised space, the

experts agree that the best first step is to lighten the largest surfaces: walls, floors, cabinets and counters. Dark walls may look sophisticated, but they’re going to reduce the amount of light bouncing around the room. Many designers start with a canvas of white walls, bringing colour into the space through furniture and objects. But even if that’s not possible, small pops of pure colour can energise a dingy space.

We may be aware of the way that colour affects light in, but we rarely notice the reverse. There’s a good reason for this, according to lighting designer Rick Shaver: old incandescent lightbulbs give off the same colour of light. “When you would screw in a lightbulb,” says Shaver, “you knew that it was always going to burn at a colour temperature of 2700°K, which is warm and flattering to the skin.” With more energy-efficient technologies, such as LEDs and fluorescents, suddenly a lightbulb was not just a lightbulb any more. “People don’t know they should be looking for 3,000°K, or what we call warm light, so instead they come home with 4,000-5,000°K, which is cool light.” This information is on packages, but most people don’t know to look for it. Shaver’s advice is to look at the colour rendering index (CRI) of a bulb. Incandescent bulbs have a rating of 100, so choosing LED bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colourful.

“If you look around and all you see are greys and khakis and beiges, then your surroundings are pretty drab”