Colour is also a spectrum

You’ve decided to bravely break away from purchasing a few cubic metres of ‘builder’s beige’ when it comes to painting or repainting. But, before you gaily decorate the frail care centre bright yellow because it’s cheerful, the restaurant red, because it increases appetite, and the spa blue, because it is said to be calming, be aware that it’s not that simple.

Colour and mood

A quick internet search will yield a smorgasbord of sites offering insight into how colour affects our mood, and how clever use of paint can affect anything from productivity to appetite and mental health. And that bit, I think, is indisputable – colour does affect mood. Although, whether you can predict how any particular colour will affect mood is moot. But there are some pretty safe guidelines:

• Light is more important than colour, so use lighter colours in a room that does not get much light.
• Yes, green is calming, but only dependably so if it comes from living plants.
• The same is true for blue – it’s calming when it’s a clear sky, or reflected by a lake, or the sea.
• White may seem to be a safe choice, but it can be over-bright, and seem clinical and harsh.
• But beige is always safe … Hmm, for ‘safe’ read ‘boring and unimaginative’. There are people who are actively offended by beige walls.

Colour is subjective

While the above ‘truisms’ are widely accepted, they do not take into account that people are individuals with unique histories. As an example, I just love the colour green and, when given a choice, will almost invariably choose it. But one of my closest friends finds green positively nauseating, which I can’t understand. I also can’t understand how she will gaily wear maroon or brown, because – you know – they’re ugly and depressing. That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.

Colour is a cultural construct

To misquote a fabulous philosophical conundrum; ‘if a tree in a forest has leaves, and there is no person there to see them, are they still green?’ Common sense tells us that it’s highly unlikely that, while we are away, the leaves in the forest secretly turn blue, and quickly change back to green when we stroll by. But, while it’s unlikely that they change colour, are they still ‘green’?

That questions the very nature of the term ‘green’. Take the needles of a pine tree, for example. They appear to be what I would call dark green – and you probably would, too. But, according to a cross-cultural study on colour perception in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Himbas from northern Namibia do not distinguish between dark green, dark blue, dark purple, dark red, dark brown and black, calling them all ‘zoozu’.

Colour is a spectrum

If you think the above is odd, just ask a group of your friends – with a similar cultural and educational background – to distinguish between blue and green. Sure – at either end of the spectrum, there will be agreement: ‘that’s definitely blue, and that’s definitely green.’ But when you venture into the realm of turquoise, teal, cyan and aquamarine, you’re likely to find disagreements: ‘my car is not blue, it’s green!’ And you’re likely to find the same issue with pink, blue and purple because, let’s be honest, most of us don’t know the difference between lilac, lavender, mauve and purple. (Hint – they are not synonyms.) Colour is genuinely, literally, a spectrum. And, like any spectrum, there are no discrete values, only degrees of difference. So, while turquoise may be bluer than teal, it’s still not blue. Or is it?

Be honest, can you really find indigo in the rainbow? To me it looks like the blue band just segues into the violet band. And, you know what? It looked like that to Newton, too, when he first studied how sunlight behaved when passing through a prism. He first divided the spectrum into red, yellow, green, blue and violet, but then – on looking further – he added orange. Now that’s interesting, because in many languages there is no separate word for the colour orange – you would just have to choose whether to call it red or yellow – or reddish yellow, or yellowish red. And, at the time Newton was playing with prisms, oranges had only been available in Britain for – at most – a hundred years, so the term as a colour was probably only a few decades old. And, at much the same time, the East India Company started importing indigo in larger quantities. Indigo referred to the dye (from the plant Indigofera tinctoria) and not the colour. But language is dynamic, so it was around this time – as indigo was supplanting the indigenous woad as the main source of blue dye – that the term ‘indigo’ came to refer to a specific shade of blue. Newton couldn’t resist adding in orange and then, because he believed seven to be superior number, he added indigo. This gave the spectrum seven colours, to match the seven notes of music (which are a construct, not a law of nature) and the seven planets in the solar system (and we all know how cast in stone that number was).

Why does this matter?

If you are responsible for the construction, maintenance or management of a residential estate, you probably know you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you really should try to please most of them most of the time – or at least not really tick them off. And this is why most developer and estate managers tend to err on the side of conservatism when it comes to colour. But there is a risk – especially as a developer – of making an estate look too ‘safe’, too ‘same’, too ‘sane’ and too ‘sad’. There is a silent rebellion brewing against sameness, conformity, convention, compliance and submission. Individuality is the new standard – and if you can’t see the irony in that, you will never be able to choose a colour, so stick to beige.

Grey is the new beige

Beige is so 20^th century – perhaps because we’re tired of its use in decor, but possibly because the Banting mantra ‘don’t eat beige food’ has subliminally turned us against this old stalwart.

For the last two decades, grey has been making serious inroads into beige’s territory as the go-to not-white neutral. Like white, it goes with everything but, unlike beige, it does not lean towards brown or yellow. (And no-one has to remind you not to eat grey food.)

Grey has a certain industrial-chic sophistication that’s quite hard to place, and it is so versatile. And savvy designers are even pairing it with beige, which is more than just hedging your bets. But, is it here to stay, or is it a passing fad that will fade quicker than the paint on the walls?

Being clever

Of course, you could throw caution to the wind, and apply a laissez-faire approach to aesthetic regulations, but that could backfire quite spectacularly (literally spectacularly). But some estates have found a balance. The Royal Alfred Marina in Port Alfred allows residents to paint their houses any colour they like – as long as it’s pastel – which has resulted in a pleasing but non-intrusive diversity. (Although you always run the risk that one person’s definition of ‘pastel’ may not be quite the same as another’s.)

A similar aesthetic policy is in place at Imhoffs Gift in Kommetjie in Cape Town. The only specification is that houses are Cape vernacular in style, so there are houses in a range of colours, but all with a similar aesthetic, creating a seemingly organic style evolution.