Colour your world
Don’t believe the naysayers. There are plenty of other colours besides Resene Black White, writes Joanna Davis.
Painting a small room shades of white can seem the safest choice – but safe can be dull. The advice from interiors experts is to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and embrace colour whatever size the room.
And while some people aren’t afraid to go wild with colour and patterns in the toilet or powder room, it’s worth considering for other small rooms too
– bedrooms are prime contenders for wallpaper and vibrant colour.
Resene residential colour consultant
Amy Watkins says people are very much afraid of using colour in small spaces. ‘‘There’s that stigma about going for a colour or a bolder tone that it makes the space feel smaller.
‘‘But it’s one of those things that if it’s positioned right, or positioned as an accent wall, or not going too dark, it can actually create the illusion of space in a smaller room.’’
She cautions it does depend on the room: ‘‘It’s not a failsafe.
‘‘But by having a feature wall or two walls in a slightly deeper tone, it’s a way of helping to push the other walls out to make the room seem larger.’’
Watkins says earth tones are popular and they show there’s no need to go really dark to get an effective contrast to a neutral.
‘‘You don’t have to go quite so dark to make the statement. You bring a depth difference instead.’’ One example is Resene Tuscany, ‘‘a lovely terracotta’’.
‘‘So it’s not dark but there’s a bit of vibrancy behind it.’’
Watkins says another trend is to use colour in a bedroom on the wall the bed backs onto.
‘‘So it’s still neutral or pastel on all the walls, but then where the bed is you have a geometric shape to create the illusion of a frame around the bed. You can use colours like emerald greens or deep navy blues. ‘‘It pushes the space back.’’ It can also create a sense of cosiness, she says.
Katikati healthcare assistant Kacey Diggelmann was rewarded for using colour in her 32m2 double mezzanine tiny home – it won the Resene Colour Choice Award at the 2022 Tiny House Awards.
The judges’ comments praised the ‘‘pops of colour’’ in the home that has plenty of the deepest dark grey/black Resene Half Nocturnal, contrasted with Resene Half White Pointer. Diggelmann chose Resene Aquarius for her laundry area, picking it up at a hardware store when she was bored one day.
Many commercially built tiny homes come standard with a neutral white or natural ply interior. The judges’ note read: ‘‘It’s a very bold move using black in a tiny house, but it pays off well here with the balance of your client’s furniture. It makes those items stand out and gives depth to the space.’’
Diggelmann says she had used Nocturnal in another house and loved it. ‘‘I decided I hated all white walls and wanted to make [the new place] my own really.
‘‘ I knew what everyone said about dark colours closing the space in, and I decided to do what I liked regardless.
‘‘I think the dark colour makes it look striking, and really works with my eclectic art. I believed in myself enough to not care what people thought.’’
Mā pua, Tasman-based interior designer Carley Lloyd, from Colourbolt Interior Design, commends the use of colour in a tiny home or any other small space.
In a tiny home, she says you can typically see all the rooms at once, so it’s both important and easy to have a contrast. That could be with wood (such as in kitchen cabinetry), which adds warmth, or through using another more neutral colour on the walls, as Diggelmann has done with the Half White Pointer.
In her work, Lloyd often has to overcome clients’ hesitance about adding colour to a small room. ‘‘They think it’s going to make it feel small and tight, or cold and dark,’’ she says.
‘‘But if you think about pattern, texture, and colour, and you incorporate those three things in the design of that space, then you can’t go wrong.’’
Her son’s room, which is small at about 2m by 3m, is decorated in Resene Licorice (a very dark grey blue) and has a graffiti-print wallpaper on one wall. She says it works because the graffiti wall adds pattern.
‘‘If you paint all four walls the same colour, it does close in the room a bit, but if you start adding pattern and texture, then your eye is drawn to something. [Here] I added the colour and pattern through that graffiti to break it up.’’
She also recommends removing as much furniture as possible in a small room – so hiding shelving and a dresser in a wardrobe, for example – and having only a bed and bedside table.
‘‘Light is really important in a small room. You need a floor lamp, bedside table lamp, fairy lights. . . Those additional features bring it to life.’’