Grey is the new brown: Colours of 2011

Grey is the new brown. 

Wearing my somewhat neglected interior-decorating hat, I received some notes about how we used colour in 2011. Yes, it's the beginning of that publishing trend to look back over the past year. I quite like these round-ups: books we loved, movies we watched, political and social highlights... just in case I missed something.


Dulux sent through its tips for colours in the home, and this is what they said:

Grey is the new brown. Seven of its top 10 colours are deep, dark browns.
Neutrals are cooler, with grey undertones, rather than warm or brown-based neutrals.
Blue is still hot, but with a grey base: think duck-egg or ocean blues.
And berry colours  - fuchsia, indigo and purples - are still hot favourites in 2012, bearing in mind Pantone's colour of 2011 was Honeysuckle, which it describes as a 'dynamic reddish pink...that elevates our psyche beyond escape."
 
Antique White USA (pic credit: Dulux
Their top colours for 2011 were: Namadji (a dark grey)
Red Box (hmmm, I painted a wall in this lush red, 8 years ago)
Woodland Grey (grey)
Domino (grey)
Malay Grey (grey)
Western Myall
Sea Elephant (sooo grey)
Jarrah
Ticking (yep, grey)



All this lovely (greyed-out) colour. But it's all still a white-wash.


The top neutrals were dominated by the investor-renovator's delight, Hog Bristle in full, half and quarter strength, but the number one white was that old fave, Antique White USA, which all you out there in decorator-magazine-land will be more than au fait with, given its dominance for the past decade. 

It reminds me of a story I was told when I first moved into interiors magazines. A girl leaving the industry said she had to go because she had run out of ways to say 'white'. 

Comments