CHROMATIC JOY

Welcome to the 2022 - 2024 Taubmans Colour Report - a celebration of bright, bold colours at a time when their positive influence is needed most. At Taubmans, we started out 2020 with an entirely different colour forecast in mind. We looked to international colour and design trends and started to build a palette and narrative. Then COVID-19 changed everything.

Our colour work seemed irrelevant and felt disingenuous. So we stopped and took the time to think about the most useful thing we could do as a paint company in these challenging times.

Historically, economic factors have influenced design trends - from the Great Depression, when designers responded to weak discretionary spending with brighter, more colourful products to catch the eye, through to the 2007-08 recession, which gave us ‘start-up minimalism’. Pinterest, Instagram, Uber, Warby Parker, We Work and Airbnb, to name a few, all grew out of this recession.

These start-ups that came into the market needed to demonstrate to corporate America wary consumers that their value lay in their products and not in heavily styled marketing campaigns, which concealed a thin reality– that they were transparent, their costs were as minimal as they could be. Simplistic start-up styling became popular in interiors for hospitality and commercial settings, with white walls, reclaimed timber tables, hanging Edison bulbs and very little ornamentation.

The result was a mix of rustic Scandinavia and Industrial that made the transition from a We Work space to a cafe a seamless experience, but a disheartening journey through spaces that provided little nourishment to our senses. It’s curious to note that this look became so ubiquitous; it may as well have been a style guide for all those fiercely individualistic start-ups. The trickle-down to domestic interiors of pared back spaces, bright white walls and timber are still evident today.

Maybe as a foil against this reductive aesthetic of the post-recession period, we went swinging the other way to rich, deep wall colours and jeweltoned furniture, which were frequent guests in many interior design magazines and blogs. I loved seeing colour used, but felt it was potentially intimidating to think about painting your entire living room dark teal and that painting every element in the room the same colour - from ceilings to skirting boards - was an affront to any architectural detailing, which got completely lost in the process.

The Taubmans Chromatic Joy colour collection boasts 32 entirely new, home-grown paint colours created using the Taubmans Coloursmith Reader. Chromatic Joy espouses the positivity of bright, bold colours while being anchored in lightness, making it easy to incorporate into any setting to imbue a sense of joy and a comforting containment.

In homage to the late Derek Mahon (1941-2020), whose poem ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’

(1979) has found fresh prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chromatic Joy hues were named from verses of the poem using the cut-up technique, in addition to the poems ‘Lives’ (Mahon 1972) and ‘When You Are Old’ (Yeats 1891).

These times are unprecedented in modern history with such loss of life, of livelihoods and immense personal sacrifice. Australia has endured so much, from the catastrophic bushfires that saw in the New Year to the global pandemic that followed. In Australia and New Zealand, communities have banded together to support those in need and care for one another. In the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we continue to work together to keep our families, our colleagues and our communities safe. In the face of crisis we have learnt to put ‘we’ above ‘me’ and to value the collective good before individualism. As we continue to traverse strict social restrictions and face a changing world, the need for air, for joy, for lightness, for happiness and for social connection has never been so pressing.

Looking ahead, we see these themes emerging in global design trends like New London Fabulous, with nods to the Memphis Design Group and the bright, boldly patterned and eccentrically shaped