The Australian Palette: How Landscape Is Rewriting the Colour Rulebook
From bushland greens to valley reds, the country’s most awarded designers are proving that the best colour palette was never on a swatch card; it was outside the window all along.
4 min
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.
The 1860s Darlinghurst mansion Stoneleigh could become Sydney’s most expensive home ever sold under the hammer when it goes to auction. Clint Ballard is giving buyers a $28 million guide for the heritage-listed mansion on Darley Street, opposite Iona, the former home of Hollywood royalty Baz Luhrmann. Stoneleigh is being offered for sale for the …
Set on one of the city’s last absolute riverfront sites, The Riversdale by Mosaic combines irreplaceable waterfront ownership with one of Brisbane’s most significant residential opportunities.
A growing number of employers say Gen Z job seekers are bringing their parents into the hiring process, from attending interviews and negotiating offers to questioning performance reviews. Recruiters warn the trend may raise concerns about independence, even as some families see it as support in a challenging job market.
4 min
Steven Clark had the unpleasant task of firing a 24-year-old—twice. Once was in a brief conversation with the new hire, who’d showed up late or not at all four times in his first week at a construction job.
Then Clark had to do it all over again, this time with the guy’s mother.
She called him a few hours later, pleading to give her son another chance. When Clark told her no, things got heated before he ended the call.
“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,’” says Clark, who is chief operating officer of a Fairbanks, Alaska-based staffing firm.
Gen Zers make up nearly one-fifth of the adult workforce, and bosses and recruiters say it often feels like the nervous parents who hovered over them through childhood and college are right alongside them. What began as the occasional parent ride-along to a job interview coming out of the Covid era is now full-on career “co-piloting,” said Jasmine Escalera, head career coach at résumé templates service Zety.
More parents are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their adult child’s behalf, and even showing up—or lurking just off-screen—on Zoom calls to help navigate difficult conversations or go over benefits packages.
“The first time it happened, I was appalled,” says Clark, who has fielded calls from parents asking why their child didn’t get a job. “Since then it’s become more of a here-we-go-again reaction.”
Human resource professionals have expressed outrage on social media.
“Parents should not be calling employers to check on their application status or ask questions on behalf of their child,” says Lynne Alba, a director of talent acquisition and physician recruitment at a large health system on Long Island, who vented about the phenomenon in a Tik Tok video she reposted on LinkedIn.
At a recent job fair, a mother approached Alba with her daughter’s résumé, explaining that she wanted to work as a nurse. “While I appreciated that she was trying to help, I intentionally shifted my attention to her daughter. No matter what Mom said, I wanted to hear directly from the candidate,” says Alba.
Some parents who step in say it’s a challenging job market for young people, and that they would only intervene in extreme circumstances—social anxiety, a toxic boss, unfair treatment. There’s also a gray area of intervention that some see as an extension of the parental advice and networking help that’s been happening for generations.
Rick Wainschel last year published a post on LinkedIn asking his network to help his daughter, a recent college graduate, find a corporate entry-level position.
Wainschel, a vice president at an automotive marketing technology company, says he doesn’t think his outreach qualifies as helicoptering. “Well, maybe a little,” he said, before quickly adding he was being half tongue-in-cheek. “It was really merely just to help her get a network established. I just think the work world is a challenging place.”
Wainschel’s post, which was OK’d by his daughter on the condition he didn’t embarrass her, didn’t lead to a job but did result in productive conversations, he said. She found a job with a credit union on her own shortly after.
Recruiters and other HR types say aggressive parental involvement signals a lack of independence and raises fears that mom and dad will be checking in regularly if their kid gets hired.
What’s more, they say, such interference rarely, if ever, works.
The phenomenon is becoming so commonplace it made the agenda of human resources organization SHRM’s national conference in June. When James Harrell asked a room of 250 professionals if they ever had a parent calling on behalf of a young employee or coming to an interview, more than half raised their hands.
“The first time it happened to me, I got high up on my soapbox and I shook my fist,” Harrell says. “The 15th time I said, ‘OK, well, I gotta figure out how to do something differently.’”
Harrell helped run an apprenticeship program for high-school students while he was the human capital management chief for the San Antonio Independent School District. To run interference, the district introduced a “signing day” when parents could come and ask questions.
After a Gen Z employee at Nation’s Best Holdings, a chain of hardware and home goods stores, didn’t get an “exceeds expectations” designation on his performance review last year, HR chief Amber Little got a call asking why.
It was one of a number of calls from parents her office has picked up recently about issues ranging from negative feedback to understanding which health insurance plan to choose. Little has even noticed parents are now calling in sick for their adult kids.
“Instead of coaching them, they do it for them,” Little says. When it happens, she adds, “we encourage them to tell their child to come talk to us and we will walk them through it.”
A Zety survey of more than 1,000 Gen Zers found 20% had a parent attend a job interview with them.
“You get a sense it’s all hands on deck for some families,” says Keith Wolf, managing partner of recruiting firm Murray Resources in Houston. His office has received emails from parents seeking jobs for their children, and Wolf says he’s always wondered if the kids even knew.
Paul “PB” Branson, who graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in May, bristles at the thought. The 22-year-old says while he understands their anxiety, parents shouldn’t be joining their children’s job interviews or contacting employees on their behalf.
“That trend,” he says, “has really hurt my generation by creating this kind of stereotype that we need our hands held.”
A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.
Limited to 630 units, Lamborghini’s latest Urus Capsule pushes personalisation further than ever, blending hybrid performance with over 70 bespoke design combinations.
