The top interior design mistakes to avoid this year

The days of white-on-white walls are fast disappearing, as we seek comfort and relaxation at home through a warm palette of colour and texture. But how to navigate the myriad options? Starting with where we get it wrong, Julia Green of Greenhouse Interiors sets the new rules for decorating through colour, calm and a little playfulness thrown in.

Using hero colours in isolation

Julia: A common mistake I see people make is not cohesively implementing their chosen hero colour throughout the space. Look at ways to unify hero colours so they aren’t standing alone without company, instead ensuring these hues are weaved through decorative objects and furniture. The most successful designs I have seen have managed to weave colour cohesively through their home like a well-made tapestry. The more subtle the tie-in is, the better!

Designer Julia Green of Greenhouse interiors used the Dulux Journey palette to breathe life into a sterile living space with warm pink tones punctuated by notes of deep plum in accessories.

BEFORE: The living space was in good order but lacked signs of life.

Using only neutral colours

Homeowners often select a neutral shade on their walls and stick to white for their ceilings and trims. The downside of this is that contrast trims on walls and ceilings can draw your eye from top to bottom, rather than allowing the eye to wander seamlessly. Instead, consider painting walls, trims and even ceilings in a single colour, to make the space feel more cohesive. That being said, contrasting pops of colour add balance which is equally important to the look and feel of any space. So, to avoid that floating feeling, ensure your room has an element of grounding through the addition of accent shades from your colour scheme through soft furnishings, textures, florals or artwork as an alternative to doors, ceilings or trims.

Julia’s most recent project used the colour, Dulux Lilac Light from the Dulux Colour Forecast 2024 Journey palette, on the walls, ceilings and trims.

Incorporating colour all at once

Another mistake people make is rushing to add colour throughout their home. Don’t feel pressured to do it all at once, start small and make measured, staggered choices. For a recent makeover I worked on in the Bellarine Peninsula, the walls were painted first in a neutral, greyed off pink shade – Dulux Lilac Light, from the 2024 Dulux Colour Forecast Journey palette – before any other choices were made. The clients lived with that for a few weeks to see how the light interacted with the colour throughout the day, before we approached the rest of the space and introduced bolder pops of colour from the palette to add layering and interest.

Designer Julia Grreen from Greenhouse Interiors says colour and pattern are key to creating inviting spaces.

Forgetting about mood

Colours evoke different moods, so it’s important to consider the look and feel you want to create in the space before landing on your hero colour. For example, I always opt for a calmer palette for the bedroom, as it is a place of rest. A living room on the other hand is where you spend much of your waking hours, so it’s good to liven it up! Pale pink is known for its calming effect – it’s gentle, easy to live with and can add warmth to a space, compared to an austere white shade. It’s also extremely versatile. The emotion it evokes can change completely depending on how it’s styled, which is why it’s a shade I like not only for living areas but also bedrooms.

The wooden dining table has been finished in Dulux Swedish Blue.

Selecting the wrong colour

Most homeowners are apprehensive of colour or they have concerns that colour may make their home feel too bold, which is why choosing the right colour is such a critical step in the design process. Incorporating colour is such an amazing opportunity to inject your own personality and story into the home, so I encourage it wherever possible. My biggest tip is to start with a neutral shade, to create a safe base that easily allows for the introduction of other colour and styling changes over time. If you’re new to using colour in your home, start small and make measured choices. Try living with colour, even if it’s a referenced cushion or decor object. The best thing about the 2024 Dulux Colour Forecast palettes is that all of the hard work is done for you. Their carefully considered palettes are designed to take the brain strain out of companion colours that work well, so when all else fails, look to the experts who have done the hard work for you – it’s foolproof.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.