Bring the outdoors in with the sweet-smelling hues of Dulux Heritage

“We work with colour everyday, and matching colours and making colour palettes is a really integral part of our practice,” says Iona Mathieson, co-founder of cult floral studio Sage Flowers and third and final tastemaker in our Evoke your Senses series in partnership with Dulux Heritage.

Like Mathieson’s famous floral arrangements, the Dulux Heritage range leads with the senses – from pale pinks evocative of peonies and potters’ studios, to cool contemporary shades shot through with nostalgia.

So safe to say that Mathieson and Dulux Heritage were a natural match when it came to choosing the final aesthete for our Evoke Your Senses series, which sees design lovers curate sumptuous colour palettes using Dulux Heritage’s range of 112 timeless shades.

With a complimentary colour card to help you pair paint shades as harmoniously as Sage’s bouquets, the Dulux Heritage range is expertly formulated with the finest ingredients to give you a perfect finish – whether you’re opting for the smooth-to-the-touch Velvet Matt for walls and ceilings, the mid sheen Eggshell for woodwork, or Undercoat for a picture perfect base.

The Dulux Heritage colour card puts you in the design driving seat, with each of the colours arranged in a tonal column that contains two pale tones, two mid tones and two deep tones. It'll even help you find the perfect white for each palette.

Need some inspiration for curating your own custom colour palette? Here, Mathieson walks us through how she brought a sense of the outdoors in using Dulux Heritage’s pretty pastels.

“The colours in this room evoke for me a really special scent”

“Often, we find ourselves slipping back into these really lovely pastel tones and matching them with pops of slightly brighter colour,” says Mathieson. “So the colours in the Dulux Heritage collection really match that for us.”

For the florist, it was the Heritage range’s more earthy tones that caught her attention – namely, the sense of freshness evoked by the mid green Pale Olivine, and the flower-like delicacy of the pale pink Powder Colour.

“The colours in this room evoke for me a really special scent,” she says of the finished result. “It’s almost like bringing the scent of nature inside.”

In bouquet terms, “we would use this palette to create bouquets for a special occasion”, she adds.

“This room makes me feel very calm, very collected, very inspired and ready to create.”

“Pale Olivine for me is a very grounding colour and it evokes the earthy nature of our bouquets,” she says. Meanwhile, “Powder Colour is almost like a mother colour for us. It’s a constant in all the work we do, and it compliments everything else really well.”

Mathieson’s parting advice for those of us hoping to curate a colour palette as effortless as hers?

“I would think about the other things you have in your home – the soft furnishings, your vases, your books – and try and think about what will go with those. Also, I think, don’t be afraid to add some colour. We love colour, we work with it all the time. So go bold.”

Hear, hear.

Have a go at curating a palette that evokes your senses by visiting the Dulux Heritage website and ordering your complimentary colour card.