Spiced Honey is Dulux’s Colour of the Year 2019
Dulux has revealed its Colour of the Year 2019 and the supporting ColourFutures™ palettes, helping inspire and transform beautiful spaces from a range of sectors.
Now in its 16th year, last week the Dulux Trade ColourFutures™ annual trend forecast revealed their Colour of Year 2019: Spiced Honey. Along with the Colour of the Year, ColourFutures™ also shared its coveted colour palettes, which have been selected to complement Spiced Honey; the palettes are designed to help professionals make colour and design choices for a variety of buildings and sectors.
Each year, Dulux invite independent experts to their Gobal Aestheitc Centre in Amsterdam, where the panel – made up of colour designers, design specialists, architects and editors – forecast the emerging design trends based on insight gathered from across the world. This information acts as the basis for the experts’ decision on what will be the colour of the year, which should embody the mood of the moment for the year ahead.
The UK representative for the 2019 expert panel was designer and innovator Jim Biddulph. Discussing the three-day workshop, he said, ““The panel discussed all manner of topics from the year gone, ranging from the social, political and cultural. Even with a range of unique perspectives from around the globe, the panel recognised the valuable role that designers play, and are increasingly playing, in bringing about positive change.”
Head of the Global Aesthetic Centre and chair of the ColourFutures™ panel Heleen van Gent explained that 2018 has been an unsettling and unpredictable time – which resulted in Heart Wood, the Colour of the Year for 2019. “We pressed pause and took time to regroup,” says Gent, discussing the consumer behaviours the panel saw last year.
“As we move forward into 2019, we find this pause has given people time to re-energise and deal with the sense of unpredictability with positive action, optimism and purpose,” Gent continues. “If the unpredictability of last year forced people to retreat and regroup, 2019 is the time for their awakening. We are ready to ‘Let in the Light’.” It seems that ‘Spiced Honey’, a warm amber tone, is the perfect shade for this theme.
Dulux states that the ochre tone can be “both calming and nourishing or stimulating and energising, depending on the palettes and light surrounding it.” The contemporary hue lends itself to a broad spectrum of interior styles and can be used within a range of spaces and buildings, from commercial to healthcare, education to residential.
Along with Spiced Honey, Dulux Trade also presented four optimistic colour palettes that use the Colour of the Year 2019 as a central hue. The palettes have been split into four themes which coincide with the ‘ways of being’ that the expert panel predict will come to the fore next year: thinking, dreaming, loving and acting. On the next page, we’ve highlighted the four palettes and the way they can be used to transform a space.
