What is ‘Australian’ colour and how do you use it?

This was the subject of a vibrant – pun intended – public talk between Sally Evans, our Director and head of Graphic Design and Product Development, and Sonia Simpfendorfer, our Director and head of Interior Design, at Décor + Design in Melbourne.

While the discussion took place last week, a watershed moment for Nexus Designs and Australian colour dates back to the 80s, when the studio worked on the Yulara tourist resort with Cox Architecture in the Northern Territory. The brief was for the building and its particular interiors to resonate with its location and spectacular surrounds of red earth, soft grey-green spinifex and bleached corn hues of the desert grasses.

“[Nexus Designs founders] Harley Anstee and Janne Faulkner collected the red dirt and native botanicals and just immersed themselves in a sense of place piece in 1984 before anyone else was really talking about that,” says Evans. “But when they started to apply those colours to the designs they were proposing, manufacturers didn’t actually have the products in those hues, so they had them custom made.”

That was the beginning of the unique Nexus Designs approach to colour, and an arm of the business helmed today by Evans that consults to the construction industry on future trends and creates colour palettes for their products.

Whether you are selecting colours for a bespoke hotel or for a suburban home, the principles are the same, according to Evans.

“You have to make the same decisions whether you are building in an urban street or a bushland setting,” she says. “It’s about observing the context of the surrounds, considering proportion and knowing the impression you want to create. For a house with a flat roof you wouldn’t start with the roof colour because you can’t see it, so think about the largest forms that would be visible to the person interacting with the building and work back from there with colours that will either highlight or contrast with those primary areas.”

When it comes to interiors, Simpfendorfer advises beginning with the foundations, such as natural light and flow, then applying finishes, materiality and furnishings before finally allowing colour to evolve from there.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come back from a site visit and said ‘this one is going to be blue,’” she says. “Instead, we start by enhancing the space to make things work really well for the people who live there, then find colour in a way that makes sense for that context.”

Using colour to create a connection between inside and outside, such as a Nexus Designs Adelaide project for which the studio painted the timber floors pink and laid pink carpet to chime with the stone cottage’s exterior walls of the same hue, is also an important consideration.

“A connection between outside and inside is vital but strong colour is not for everyone,” says Simpfendorfer. “Whatever colour you choose, it needs simply to be about creating a sense of joy, light, and purpose.”

As to whether there is such a thing as ‘Australian’ colour, she says it is more about how we use colours than labelling a certain hue as our own.

“The intensity of a yellow front door could be the colour of tulips in Amsterdam as much as it could be the colour of wattle, so unless colours are literally taken from the earth as Harley and Janne did we cannot claim them as Australian. But what we can claim as Australian is the way we use colour as a response to light, place and the uniqueness of the Australian environment in a broader context.”

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