The 2023 colour palettes to set you up for clear, calm spaces to soothe your soul and energise your mind
Refresh your home, your investment property and your mindset with these nature-inspired colour schemes
3 min
Anyone who has taken even a passing interest in interior colour trends in recent years will tell you that the tones and shades of nature have played a strong role. Whether it’s the deepest ocean blues, the softest greens or the earthiest golds and terracottas, we’re looking for a deeper connection to natural spaces and environments within our own four walls. That’s the strongest theme in interior colour choices moving into 2023. This perhaps should come as no surprise given the past couple of years when so many of us have turned to nature for solace and as a way to re-energise ourselves, body and soul.
Green leads the way in terms of colourways, almost always with warm undertones, from soft seafoam shades and eucalyptus green to deep shades of olive and forest green and tantalising mixes of teal green.
Australian paint company, Haymes, describes their ‘Carefully Nurtured’ palette as restorative and reinvigorating as we begin to power up after two years of uncertainty and, in many cases, separation.
Biophilic elements – the human desire to connect with nature – make this palette ideal for creating connection between indoor and outdoor spaces, especially when teamed with natural materials such as timber and stone, as well as fibres such as linen and wool.
Warm colour bases ensure that while the green palette speaks of open space, a sense of cosiness is retained.
Similarly, the Balance and Connect colour palettes from Dulux focus on creating an equilibrium. While mid tones of teal and green speak of the natural world,
the softness of these colours provides the perfect backdrop for contemporary or mid century furniture and abstract art.
For more inspiration, architecture and design news, order your copy of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine here.
These are palettes that focus on harmony over contrast, with similar tones placed alongside each other for depth. Equally at home on cool winter nights or warm spring days, lighter colours are ideal for shared spaces, like open plan living areas, while deeper shades create a sense of comfort, intimacy and even drama in less frequented areas such as bedrooms, home offices or formal dining spaces.
Indeed, the beauty of these palettes is their versatility, able to make themselves at home in contemporary environments, as well as breathing new life into more traditional homes.
Whether the look is relaxed elegance or contemporary chic, the sense is one of calm and serenity.
As we continue to examine what life looks like in a post COVID world, the beauty of paint is that if you tire of it or your priorities change, it’s one of the least expensive and invasive options to change your space.
And that’s something we can all feel good about.
Connect
This warm palette from Dulux (above) doesn’t shout its appeal from the rooftops. Instead, they are the kinds of colours that improve on better acquaintance. Choose from deep earth tones such as Cinnamon Sand or Research for intimate spaces like bedrooms and separate dining, or opt for Whisper White in shared spaces such as living rooms.
Drawing energy
If there is one colour that has dominated interior palettes in recent years, it is green. A key element of the biophilic trend, where we seek out the nature to restore balance to our increasingly tech driven world, shades like Haymes Botanist Green (above) continue to delve deeper each season. Texture is key, as cut flowers or indoor plants.
Balance
This dreamy palette (above) from the Dulux range draws on the ocean for colour inspiration. Gleaned from visits to Milan design Week and Future Laboratory London, among others, this palette is about stripping back the superfluous to immerse yourself in colour. Team with luxurious textures like velvet and silk for a look that is both sophisticated and comforting.
Light play
This palette from Haymes Paints (above) plays with notions of light – what colours reflect it and what colours absorb it. Colours like Empress Blue (below) play surprisingly well with pastels like Haymes Faith and Aloe Green. Add texture with hand made ceramics and organic patterns.
For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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