COLOUR IN MY INTERIOR DESIGN PRACTICE

By Danielle Brustman, designer

I have always been interested in colour. I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s when bold colours and graphic shapes were everywhere. I recall being particularly excited by supergraphics and psychedelic video clips of the 1970s and later with bold pastel graphic shapes and forms inspired by the Memphis design movement that exploded in Australia in the 1980s. Colouring-in and drawing were my thing. I would spend hours absorbed in colour and shape, creating my own worlds. It was a meditation essentially. Nothing much has changed, only now I create colour formations through interior, lighting and furniture design.

Colour is powerful. It can completely transform a space. You can layer a room with an intricately crafted palette. This has become an increasingly important, joyous part of my practice.  I try to create interiors that are unique and satisfying for the senses, in colour, light and form.

Colour, or specifically paint colour, is accessible to clients regardless of their budget. I particularly like that colour can elevate a space, without being prohibitively expensive. I am interested in ways to be creative and impactful without being out of reach to most people.

I am drawn to interior spaces that hover in a world of reality and fantasy. Colour can give extra punch and theatricality. An example is Inner-Terior (pictured below) for the Rigg Design Prize 2018 at NGV. It proposed an alternate domestic living space, asking if the home can be more fantastical. While providing comfort and refuge it also transcends conventional domesticity, inspired by the aesthetics of performance and stage.

I like to play around with the conventions of colour and what one expects to find in either a domestic or public space. In 2020 I completed a child care centre, Brighton Street Early Learning. It is not often that I get the opportunity to be as bold with colour specification. I could treat each wall, bench surface and material with a range of colour blends of varying hue and material. Children are imaginative and uninhibited. It made complete sense to me that these spaces be filled with stimulating and inspiring visuals. But it was also important that the staff would enjoy the interiors as much as the children. I wanted to push the colour palette to its limits. I wanted it to be complex and colourful while still adhering to a level of sophistication, gentleness and balance. Colours and materials used in education can be a bit crude and institutional. I wanted to completely break away from that model and present child-friendly spaces that felt more personalised and fun to be in. In total we specified 47 interior paint colours.

I am interested in saturation as a colour experience. I enjoy creating monochromatic interiors where one or two colours are completely dominant. I was first introduced to immersive saturated interiors by the 1960s/70s interiors and furniture design of Verner Panton. I find it thrilling when a space is mapped out in an interior spectrum of hue from only one or two colours.

Certain colours when paired emit a frequency that is particular and unique. I’m fascinated by that. I like incorporating traditional colour harmonics but it is sometimes in an unlikely colour combination that I discover the colour tension or effect that I’m after. Sometimes a single colour that is slightly incongruous with a palette is the ingredient that allows a space to sing. This was explored in the 2019 Chromatic Fantastic collection (pictured below) first created for Melbourne Design Week 2020 and subsequently displayed at the NGV International for NGV Triennial 2020.