Natural healing

For most people, your bedroom is your sanctuary – the place where you begin and end each day, and where you retreat to recharge your batteries. It’s also a space that demands special care be taken when decorating and selecting a colour palette.

The hues you choose to surround yourself with have been shown to have a significant psychological and emotional impact, which means that you’re going to want to select ones that support restfulness and rejuvenation. Earthy greens have long been touted as some of the most calming colours around, primarily for their association to nature. So, it makes sense to look to this section of the colour wheel as the base of your palette.

The trick, though, is finding a balance between building up those soft serene tones and evoking enough interest and intrigue to keep the space from becoming boring. The simplest ways to achieve this are by building up tactile and visual texture and picking some great accent colours to complement your hero hue.

Battens are an easy way to create texture on your walls or ceiling, and the only limit to how you use them is your imagination. Your battens could be vertical or horizontal lines, a right-angled grid, turned 45 degrees, form geometric designs like diamonds or hexagons or used to generate more randomised designs. And just because you want to add battens to a wall doesn’t mean they have to go all the way to the ceiling or floor.

This cosy bedroom has texture to spare, including a dense series of thin half-round battens adorning the shelf wall that plays the part of the headboard. To create even more interest, the upper section of wall is painted in Resene Stone Age while the lower shelf section and battens are in slightly deeper Resene Wilderness. While these soft, earthy greens are quite similar, they’re just different enough to ground the room – which is especially important when you want to go for a lighter coloured floor like this one in Resene Green White.

Further texture has been brought in through a mixture of textiles and bedlinens in natural fibres in hues ranging from olive green to dusty terracotta to biscuit beige. To bring these colours off the bed and around the room, various vases, plant pots and other accessories have been painted in Resene Beethoven, Resene Papier Mache, Resene Teak, Resene Twine and Resene Celeste. Similar to the subtle difference between Resene Stone Age and Resene Wilderness, these colour choices are ever so slightly deeper than those seen in the textiles. The eye connects them all the same so that the palette feels cohesive, but their slight differences leave you with the sensation that there is more interest at play.

To incorporate yet another earthy element, the cylindrical bedside tables have been given a marbled look. We first painted them in two coats of Resene Alabaster, allowing it to dry completely before using a small artists’ brush to add ‘veins’ in Resene FX Paint Effects Medium coloured with Resene Rolling Stone. Just like with the rest of the textures in this room, the secret is to build up layers to create this paint effect. Start with looser brushstrokes and less pigment mixed into your Resene FX Paint Effects Medium and wipe with a clean, dry rag quickly to fade them into the background. Once your first layer has dried, continue adding subsequent layers with slightly more Resene Rolling Stone added into them with your paint strokes becoming thinner, straighter and more deliberate. It can be helpful to look at a photograph of marble as a reference while you’re creating your effect. There isn’t really a wrong way to go about it, but if you feel like you’ve added too much Resene Rolling Stone, you can always pull it back a bit by softly rubbing over parts with the corner of another clean rag dipped in a bit of Resene Alabaster.

For a less earthy and more eclectic colour palette, swap out the warmer accent tones like Resene Beethoven, Resene Papier Mache, Resene Teak, Resene Twine for a deep red, an inky blue and a duck egg blue, such as Resene Spitfire, Resene Indian Ink and Resene Half Duck Egg Blue.

Project by Laura Lynn Johnston. Images by Wendy Fenwick. 2021