Renovators, designers and homeowners - white is out and pink is in.
The colour pink dominated the winning categories in the 2018 Resene Total Colour Awards, which celebrated the work of New Zealand's interior and exterior designers.
Among the pink hues that featured in the winning projects were the amusingly and aptly named Extrovert, Minelli, Glamour Puss, Ballerina and Petite Orchid.
Resene marketing manager Karen Warman said: "Pinks have been trending for a while but we’ve never seen them with this level of prominence before.
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"They’ve shaken off their once-limiting presumption of being a feminine colour and have taken a fitting place in the colour spectrum for both interiors and exteriors."
The winneing projects were announced on the runway at New Zealand Fashion Week on Wednesday.
Invercargill based Lemon Creative led by Louise Evans won best Commercial Office Interior for the renovation work she did on her own office.
The mosiac style she employs uses pink to smart effect and she quotes David Bowie to describe her design philosophy: "'I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.'"
She added: "In 2016 I decided to leave the big smoke ad agency life for something a little more calm. I headed home to Invercargill, at the bottom of the world, right in the middle of winter. Madness. I freelanced remotely from the botanical gardens just to keep warm.
"A year later with no sign of business waning I decided I probably needed to find an office space. I saw so much grey. I couldn’t find anything like the Sydney and Wellington agencies I‘d cut my teeth in. So I decided to create my own space."
She calls her renovated space Cahoots.
Two other New Zealand entries whose colour palettes includes an array of pinks were an art installation by Cynthia Yuan, Kevin Ding Kun, Kim Huynh and Norman Wei at Brick Bay, Northland, and a bathroom renovation in an historic house in Mount Cook, Wellington by Debra Delorenzo of One Ranfurly.
The overall winner at the award ceremony was RTA Studio, for their work on Freemans Bay School, in Auckland.
The project, led by architect Moshin Mussa, referenced Maori culture and the school’s proud multi-cultural heritage in its colour palette.
“The cladding panels are painted in rich and vibrant colours to encompass the school’s diverse cultural community and the children’s different ethnic backgrounds,” Mussa said.
The site contained existing 1960s school buildings, playing fields, and car parking. To make way for the new development, all existing buildings apart from one were removed.
Mussa said: ¨Colour is a relatively cost-effective way to bring a project to life. We used colour to characterise the school’s identity and also to enhance the architecture. Resene paint colours were selected as they best represented our conceptual design ideas. They proved to be exactly what the school was after and we’ve had numerous comments from visitors and from community members on how striking the colours are.”
