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.
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
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