Colour and our sense of place

Colour, as we perceive it, is a trick of the light; a love letter gifted to us by a universe that is made up of wondrous things. 

And yet, it is a factor so intrinsically tied to our happiness and well-being that colour psychology predates psychology. Egyptians practised colour healing, building temples that allowed light to pour through rubies, emerald, and sapphires, tinting the stone to the shade that would best heal your illness. Across the world, one of the oldest medical documents published, the Huangdi Neijing, used colour to diagnose illnesses in patients: red, linked to the heart and the small intestines; green, for the liver, yellow for the spleen, black for the kidney, and white for the lungs.

In more modern practices, colours have been proven to soothe and reinvigorate. University researches in Lille found that greenery and colours both showed a boost in morale. Interior designers espouse frequently on the use of natural timbers to add warmth into the homes, on designating colours such as blue for restful areas and red for living rooms and kitchens, yellow flowers for the garden to brighten up dull days, creamy white shades for bathrooms and places with less sunshine to lift the gloom. 

We are also fortuitous enough to live in a time where access to colours is, widely, simplified. Technology has given us a kingdom’s fortunes of colour options, and what previously would have taken an artist’s life work to document is available to us with a few button clicks, and where that colour can go wherever we desire: on wood, on steel, on polymer, on tile, on glass, beautifying the spaces that we spend most of our time in. Whether it’s a city centre or a sleepy village square, a little splash of colour stops the world. 

What’s in a colour?

Red for luck, green for life, blue for calm: the colours we surround ourselves with tell their own story, and become something greater than the sum of their parts. When it comes to places and to building places, the importance of what colour we select grows in importance. As stewards of the built environment, our duty is bisected between the care of the grey and the care of the green; our colour choices therefore have to be at home both in the middle of a shopping estate and the fringes of a forest. Furthermore, the colours we picked had to say something about the products they were on, and a little bit about the promises that we have made as Furnitubes. 

To narrow it down, we looked at ourselves over a long afternoon, armed with coffee and a lot of conversation, and came up with the six tenets of our identity, our values, and what we promise you. 

A palette of place

At the end of that exercise, we had over 60 colours to choose from, collected from the best of each separate ideal. 

We wanted to refine further, which led us to the following metric: 

Where does colour belong?

The places that our furniture is placed in are not all made the same – our benches have toured housing estates, hidden walkways, and the fringes of historical communities. The timber we use and the product type all necessitated a different colour need. As our designer said, a planter needs a different colour to a wall-top bench. 

But further to that, a heritage walk requires a different breadth of colour than a new-build shopping estate. 

Our intention with the furniture we create is to blend into heritage settings, and liven up the grey. 

However, we also want to give the creative designers, contractors, and buyers the opportunity to reverse that, if they want to – without burdening them with an overwhelming choice of colours. 

With that in mind, we narrowed it down to 15 shades. 

Each of these fifteen colours can be applied without further consideration of where that bench will go, and without additional waiting time, adding the colour you want to see in the world to your product as the final touch to urban spaces.