Walk through the Australian bush, and you’ll find a green that no paint chart quite captures. Eucalyptus canopy filtered through dust, heat and distance, grey at the edges, sometimes almost silver, never one fixed shade.

For decades, Australian interiors avoided it for exactly that reason. It was much easier to paint the walls white and look at the landscape.

That is no longer the case. Across this year’s Dulux Colour Awards, the celebrated projects shared an unmistakable thread: colour drawn not from trend forecasts or mood boards, but from the ground the buildings stand on.

Bushland greens, harbour blues, valley reds, coastal aquas are a palette with terroir, if such a thing can be said of paint.

“There’s a strong sense that designers are moving beyond safe, uniform schemes and embracing colours that reflect the local Australian landscape,” says Dulux Colour and Design Manager Lauren Treloar.

She points to greyish greens echoing coastal bushland, cool blues that nod to Sydney’s harbourside light, and rust-toned reds pulled from inland, rural country. “These shades feel rich, earthy and versatile.”

White walls, grey stone, maybe navy if a client was game, that was the old formula. Now colour is being used to describe where a house actually is, not just how it looks.

The house that disappears into its garden

Few projects made that argument more persuasively than Nithsdale, an 1890s villa in Stanmore, restored and extended by Studio Prineas as an intergenerational family home.

Once compromised by decades of unsympathetic renovation, the house has been restored to something like coherence, and colour has done much of the heavy lifting.

Architect Rachel Prineas didn’t stop at a front door or a strip of trim.

She drenched the entire exterior in two deep tones, Dulux Bronze Icon and Tambo Tank, pulling render, timber and ironwork into one chromatic field, lifted straight from the native planting around the house, species indigenous to Wangal Country. The building and its garden start to blur into each other.

Judge Ben Peake, Principal at Carter Williamson Architects, called the result mature and sophisticated, praising the discipline behind it: deliberate selections lifted from the immediate native landscape rather than abstracted from it.

The effect is a house that no longer sits in its garden so much as it recedes into it, camouflage as design strategy, and a quietly radical rebuttal to the idea that heritage colour has to mean caution.

A valley, painted from the inside out

If Nithsdale shows landscape dictating a single, disciplined hue, The View, this year’s Residential Interior winner, designed by Studio Shields in the treetops of the Yarra Valley, shows what happens when an entire palette is built from the shifting conditions of a single place over time.

Seven years, start to finish. The colour scheme evolved right alongside the build, tones tested on site, adjusted through the seasons, checked against the light as it moved across the valley.

“The palette draws from oxidised earth, eucalyptus canopy, dry grasses and shifting skies, allowing the interior to feel inseparable from the landscape,” says designer Ruby Shields.

Chartreuse and olive pick up the bushland outside the windows. Burgundy and earthy reds anchor the more intimate rooms, echoing soil and aged timber. Powdered electric blues cut through the warmth for clarity.

It is, in Shields’ words, less a single decision than a tonal narrative, unfolding room by room as a considered journey.

Judge Sarah Jane-Pyke, of Arent&Pyke, singled out the precision of that placement, and the cohesion it created, proof, she said, of how thoughtfully deployed colour can enhance the texture of everyday life.

It’s a long way from colour as decoration. Here, it functions closer to memory: a way of encoding a specific valley, its light and its seasons, into the walls of a house.

When the landscape is the coastline

Not every project translating “place” into paint sits in the Australian bush.

Te Pākau Maru, a 63-home development on former brownfield sites in New Brighton, Christchurch, took its name, meaning “the sheltering wing,” or “the place of joy”, from a gift by Ven Dr Lyndon Drake, and built its exterior palette around the beach, sea and sky.

What ties Nithsdale, The View and Te Pākau Maru together isn’t a shared shade; it’s a method.

Each project treats its palette as more of a site survey than a style choice, asking what a place already looks like before deciding how a building should be painted.

Treloar sees this as central to where Australian and New Zealand design is heading.

Warm neutrals are doing particularly well in the Australian climate right now, she says, softening rooms without losing their contemporary edge, and sitting easily next to the timber, linen and stone that anchor so many of these projects. The bigger shift, though, is about provenance. Designers can increasingly tell you why a colour belongs in a house, not just that it looks good in it.

There’s a practical lesson in all this for anyone renovating or building right now: skip the trend report. Step outside instead. Look at the ground, the trees, the light at a particular time of day. Ask what the house is already surrounded by.

As these award-winning projects prove, the answer was often there all along; you just have to be willing to bring it inside.

It’s the brand’s most ambitious physical activation to date, and the setting for the launch of its new Bloom Collection.

At the centre of the collection are three new SABRÉMOJI flower charms, named Wild Daisy, Sunflower and Cherry Blossom, each made entirely from upcycled leather offcuts and finished with ultrasonic embossing and embroidery.

There’s also the Floral Twist Handle, arguably the house’s most technically demanding piece yet, which takes 36 individual hand-tied knots to form six leather flowers, plus another ten structural knots that let it convert from a hand-carry to a shoulder strap.

A new Floral Wristlet debuts a leather-knotting technique developed specifically for the collection.

Between them, the pieces bring the brand’s product ecosystem to more than 10,000 possible styling combinations, all built from what would otherwise be manufacturing waste.

“Bloom is the latest evolution in the MAISON de SABRÉ product ecosystem, reimagining the handbag as a living canvas,” said co-founder and creative director Omar Sabré. He points to the smaller pieces as proof of intent rather than afterthought: “The smallest products demand extraordinary precision.”

It’s a strategy with numbers behind it.

The brand’s connected styling platform, of which Bloom is the latest chapter, has helped push MAISON de SABRÉ past $100 million in annual revenue and lifted average order value by 45 per cent, evidence that designing products to be added to and reinterpreted has become a genuine commercial engine rather than a marketing line.

The SABRÉMOJI charm platform alone has sold more than 500,000 units globally, with sold-out collaborations including Pokémon, Hello Kitty and Mr Men Little Miss.

For co-founder and managing director Zane Sabré, the Atelier is really about where the relationship with a customer begins.

“Retail is no longer just about selling products; there’s been a structural shift toward experience and participation,” he said.

“With Bloom, we wanted to create an environment where clients can experience our craft, understand our styling system and explore what is possible before they think about making a purchase.”

The Floral Atelier runs from July 3-26 in New York. The Bloom Collection launched globally today at maisondesabre.com, before rolling out to stockists including Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Net-a-Porter’s FWRD, Revolve, Farfetch, Le Bon Marché and Ounass.