Dulux Announces 39th Colour Awards Winners

The treatment transformed “a purely functional element into a personality-driven link between the interior and exterior.”

The Armadale store of the Australian jewellery brand melds the striking yellowy-green tones of Dulux’s Delta Break with a host of reflective surfaces in an appropriately jewel-like space that the award judges described as “highly original, timeless and transformative”. For Lava Flow, a reimagined residence perched on the edge of a volcanic precipice, Pac Studio opted for large expanses of Dulux’s Silo Park, a deep earthy crimson, displaying “remarkable chromatic restraint, spatial understanding and precise execution”, according to the judges.

Emerging architectural practice SSdH won the Single Residential Exterior award for Dunstan, a home in a post-war housing estate in Melbourne’s Preston, where a pergola highlights the warm nature of Dulux’s Yellow Varnish. The treatment transformed “a purely functional element into a personality-driven link between the interior and exterior,” says judge Kim Bridgland of Edition Office.

“It is not only the combination of colours that delights – it is their precise placement, proportions and ratios that are so exquisitely handled.”

Elonera House in Melbourne by Studio Doherty was named winner of the Residential Interior category. Inside the home’s classic Edwardian facade, the designer has created a nuanced modern sensibility, dominated by a raft of subtle Dulux colours, including Calandre and Camellia. “It is not only the combination of colours that delights – it is their precise placement, proportions and ratios that are so exquisitely handled,” says judge Alex McLeod of at.space.

Not surprisingly, the much-lauded Melbourne Place hotel by Kennedy Nolan won best Commercial Interior – Public and Hospitality. A rich palette of Dulux colours – including the muddied yellow-green Amazon Depths, the burnished Cumberland Red and the subdued terracotta Desert Soil – enhance every space of the multi-faceted project, from the basement bar and bistro to the rooms and rooftop restaurant. Says judge Rachel Luchetti of Luchetti Krelle: “The overarching aesthetic is immersive and much of the drama, intimacy and downright sexiness of its multi-layered offerings are due to the superb use of colour.”

“The way the light plays upon this outer skin creates depth and dimension akin to a fine-laced veil.”

A deftly untypical operations hub took the gong for best Commercial and Multi-Residential Exterior. Northern Memorial Park Depot in Glenroy, Melbourne, by Searle x Waldron Architecture, features graduated shades of blue, green and grey – including Dulux Teahouse and Tranquil Green – across its perforated steel-screen exterior. “The way the light plays upon this outer skin creates depth and dimension akin to a fine-laced veil,” comments judge Andrea Lucena-Orr, Dulux’s colour and communications manager.

Finally, the Temporary or Installation Design winner was an exhibition of photographs by Carol Jerrems at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, designed by Youssofzay Hart. The Australian Student prize went to Angela Xu and Georgia Reader from the University of Sydney for Landscape of Co-existence, an affordable housing concept, while the New Zealand Student prize was won by Will Chomchoei from the University of Auckland for Pātaka Kōrero Fale O Tala: A Storehouse of Narratives in Samoa.