The psychology of colour as an accent in your home, can be like therapy and have a positive, or indeed negative, effect on a person’s health and wellbeing. At Random Thatch, GREEN is the overriding colour accent. Partly because we’re surrounded by the countryside (now breathe deeply), but plants and nature also help echo the outside - inside, too. It’s easily the most relaxing colour for your home environment. Grey maybe the modern neutral and beats boring beige, but to get that whole beautiful Bohemian vibe, complement your interior space and add plants: essential to your emotional psyche.

Colour As Therapy

Well-chosen decor is known to positively contribute to creating a healing environment in which patients can relax, and feel at ease. Colour can not only make the clinical space look attractive, it can aid the healing process according to recent research by the Dulux Smarter Spaces Education Campaign.

Interior designers are being encouraged to use colour for therapy. The lack of colour (white walls) is modern, yet cold and unfamiliar to the elderly, having long been the hallmark of a more ‘institutional’ environment. At The Everybody Centre at the Barbara Castle Way Health Centre in Blackburn, which offers health and wellbeing services for young people aged 14-24, each private consultation and waiting room has its own colour identity, giving young people a choice dependant on their mood. The accompanying reception area and waiting room carry through the colour palette of the pods with bright hues present within wall decoration and seating. There’s also a vibrant pink, orange and lime green children’s playroom in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Dyson Centre, Bath. The Salisbury District Hospital uses dark purple and blue mixed with lime green and orange for teenage waiting rooms.

Healthy Colour?

• Orange stimulates the appetite, while blue can supress it. This has led to specific colour schemes for dining rooms in mental health facilities treating people with eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia. However, orange may also stimulate mental activity, so is often avoided in mental health units treating those with more intense psychological conditions.

• Interestingly, aside from how colour makes patients feel, it can also have an impact on diagnosis too. Reflection from yellow surfaces has been found to minimise observation of blue skin tone, while reflection from blue surfaces can unnaturally enhance cyanotic tone (low oxygen levels or cyanosis present with blue or purple skin colouration). Likewise, yellow or blue surfaces can make observing babies with liver disease, who present with yellowing of the skin, more difficult.

• Walls painted green or blue/green in an operating theatre is deliberate, as green is the complimentary colour to red and helps neutralise the after image produced by the surgeon’s concentration while focusing on a deep red wound. (Sorry - but interesting isn’t it?)

• Yellow, while associated with joy, happiness, intellect and energy, is also known to make babies cry more. Curiously, the first nursery we painted for our children was yellow - she had collic, big time! Experts say avoid yellow shades in maternity and neonatal wards. Red, “while energetic and powerful, raises blood pressure, so would not be the best choice for a cardiac unit” say Dulux.

In Your Home?

Here’s how to add a little extra positivity to your home:

• Don’t give up white and grey - they’re the modern, sophisticated neutral palette to boring beige - but do choose accent colours to create energy and make your home more warm and enveloping (other than blankets obviously!)

• Choose warmer tones in the hallway where you greet guests, and always make it smell inviting too. Choose wooden seats and introduce colour with cushions that can change seasonally too.

• Use a clean, softer palette to highlight key features such as behind sinks, cupboard doors or window walls. Colour is a brilliant way of creating impact and enhancing spaces on a relatively tight budget.

• Keep colour to children’s rooms to encourage curiosity, and create an impression of fun. Research says “clear and unsophisticated colours help reduce anxiety and confusion.” Nature blue and green hues work well.

Living With Elderly?

Consider a few tiny, considerate changes:

• Have an all white bathroom suite? Changing the colour of the toilet seat to a shade at least 30% different to the rest of the toilet helps dementia sufferers see where to sit, thus avoiding potential accidents and falls.

• Colour can help identify individual areas and ‘way finding’ for senile or people with dementia, as the use of colour can help objects stand out and prevent trips and falls.

• Choose colours familiar to your elderly relative to make them feel more ‘at home’ . By giving them a familiar environment to look at can make an enormous difference.

Many thanks to Dulux for sharing their insights in this valuable ongoing campaign to help boost our awareness on colour therapy in our homes and shared spaces. What’s your favourite colour?