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Dulux Announces 2024 Colour Awards Winners
Selected from 83 finalists across Australia and New Zealand, the winners of the 2024 Dulux Colour Awards have been recognised for their courageous and visionary use of colour.
Alexandria House in Sydney by Lachlan Seegers Architect and Seven Colourful Little Houses just outside of Christchurch by COMMON Architecture + Interior Design Studio are this year’s winners of, respectively, the Australian and New Zealand Grand Prix, the top accolade in the 2024 Dulux Colour Awards. They join a raft of other sublimely colourful projects – from schools to inner-city retail outlets ¬– to win categories in the awards, now in their 38th year.
Alexandria House stood out for its bold use of a singular colour – Dulux Cumberland Red – for the ceiling of the home. Judges described it as “a deeply moving, soulful space; an architectural wonder exemplifying the power of a single colour and the potential of a unique strategy, confidently executed, to establish a new paradigm.” Across the ditch, Seven Colourful Little Houses demonstrated the power of colour to transform a streetscape. “Literally a row of low-cost houses in outer-suburban Christchurch, [the project] prompts a total rethink of the possibilities of urban development,” the judges noted.
Both projects reveal the power of combining colour with innovation to create profound, evocative spaces. Winners across other categories explored a similar theme. House in Surry Hills by Architect George took out the Single Residential Exterior category for its use of local and global references to inform the colour palette. A front facade in Aerobus blue picks up hues in the surrounding streets and the original Victorian elements throughout the home, while a deep red adds vibrancy to the back lane. Kariton Sorbetes in Melbourne’s Chinatown by Bagnoli Architects won the Commercial Interior – Workplace and Retail category. Inspired by Manila’s ice-cream carts (karitons), the subtle space features peeling painted walls and scattered coloured stools, and uses Dulux hues like Hydrangea Pink, Celery Green and Sea Cliff Half to stunning effect.
The winners also showcased the importance of pushing boundaries. “If there is a dominant theme this year, it is the use of colour in all-encompassing ways, from coating every surface of a room in a single shade to painting an entire building in tonal graduations of one colour,” says Andrea Lucena-Orr, Dulux’s colour and communications manager. “Although all these projects are quite distinct programmatically, there are some strong directions that have emerged. Colour blocking has been used to great effect across a number of projects in which spatial boundaries have been defined through colour alone. We are also seeing colour saturation in internal and external applications.”
For 2024, the awards program was expanded to include Temporary or Installation Design as a standalone category, and was won by Boardgrove Architects for the Community Hall at the NGV’s 2023 ‘Melbourne Now’ exhibition. “It is testament to the sophistication of this genre for it is a visual feast of clashing colours, brilliant and brave,” says Lucena-Orr. “We are excited to be able to expand the program to award projects of this calibre.”
She was joined on the judging panel this year by design-industry professionals including Shaun Carter, founder of Carter Williamson, Monique Woodward, co-founder of WOWOWA Architecture, and Eva-Marie Prineas, founder of Studio Prineas.
