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'Oh my god, it's stunning!’: We asked a colour consultant to transform this dull Dublin bedroom
Plus, the easiest way to teenager-proof your paint.
FOR THE MAKEUP lovers and teenagers who’ve grown up in the age of Instagram, light in your bedroom can be absolutely essential. For this, many parents may opt for a clean, white paint for their teenagers’ bedrooms.
Soon enough, it can become pretty evident that pristine white paint doesn’t tend to mix so well with makeup and fake tan. So, what’s the answer? Carmel McCusker (@doxyinterior) was having this exact problem.
With Flying Colours is a brand new video series that we’re running with Dulux. Over the next few months, we’ll convert a room in four busy households to show the huge impact that colour can have on our homes.
Carmel’s fifteen-year-old daughter was moving into the attic room in the house and she wanted to give her the perfect space to have her friends over, do homework, and of course, do a little makeup.
But choosing the right shade for a room you can spend up to half of your 24 hours in each day can be a tough feat. Carmel wanted to avoid darker colours that might affect the light in the room, but she also wanted something that could withstand the beauty habits of a teenage girl.
To get advice, we recruited the help of colour consultant Darran Heaney (oldvictoriannew), who almost immediately had a vision for Carmel’s daughter’s new bedroom.
Heaney agreed with Carmel’s opinion that there was too much white in the room, and started taking inspiration from some of the items around the house, particularly an Asian-inspired teal barrel, seen in the video:
I think the colour in the room here is very flat and quite stark. What I’d like to do is bring some colour palette from the rest of the home into this room.
For Darran, one shade in particular really stood out for him in the Dulux Easycare colour card – Freshwater Pearl. For the woodwork, he opted for something classic – Antique White. And the painters set to work…
A few coats of paint later, it was time to finally show the room to Carmel. For her, the transformed bedroom was proof that it’s worth straying from white paint, even if her family had originally said otherwise: “I actually love it, I really do. [My family] are always telling they want white, white, white, and I’m saying ‘no, let’s go for a bit of colour’.”
She recommended that other homeowners do the same: “There are so many beautiful colours out there, it’s worth trying them out – white isn’t always the brightest.”
For Darran, the colour was proof that pastels can be just as warming as neutral shades: “I think it’s warm, it’s bright, I think it’s exactly what the homeowners were looking for.”
If you’ve a very busy space, Darran says that choosing a washable paint is an essential: “In rooms of high traffic or rooms like this where there’s lots of makeup being used, you can wipe the walls clean.”
Got a busy household too? Dulux Easycare takes the stress out of spills with stain-repellant technology. The range is 50 times tougher than Dulux Vinyl Matt and allows you to just wash away common stains. Easycare Satinwood even comes with scrub resist technology, meaning you can always keep every room looking freshly painted.
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