Each week we showcase a design product we love, something that we think would fit perfectly within our dream IO Kids’Design room – alongside our IO Bunk Pod and IO Doodle Box, of course!
It’s so unbearably gloomy outside right now, isn’t it? Take heart though – in just a month, the winter solstice will be behind us and we’ll be on our way out through the tunnel of winter and back into the light.
At this time of year, more than any other, we crave homes that are havens; places where we may eat, sleep, read & relax. What better antidote to the grey outside than bright splashes of colour within? Colour is decorative soul food, that’s what we think (and less ruinous to a pre-Christmas diet than chocolate brownies) – and it’s what Simon March ofColour Makes People Happy thinks too.
Dealing exclusively with Dutch paint (‘they’re the best,” he asserts, simply) Simon lays no claim to any artistic ability (aside from being a dab hand at pouring paint into a pot) but knows what he likes. People’s relationship with colour, he says, is instinctive and primal; little to do with what they’ve read in an interiors magazine. Taste is simply the ability to make confident, decisive choices. And even aside from the ‘happy’ promised in the store’s name, there are the well-documented influences of colour on children’s behaviour and intelligence.
So we’re not about to tell you that a child’s room should be green, or yellow, or red, and we definitely don’t hold with the ‘pink is for girls, blue is for boys’ school of thought. We just think that colour is fun, whether it’s adorning the walls of a child’s bedroom, smeared over their hands after a particularly lively painting session, crusted under their nails after an innings with the play-dough, or seen in an array of felt tips spread out over the floor, ready to be bundled back up into a DoodleBox after crafting time is done. Making colour, and the choosing of it, even more fun, are the odd-ball monikers assigned to each on the Colour Makes People Happy site: choose from ‘The Most Important Colour of All: Hair of Nan”, ‘Red Stewart’, ‘Dog Biscuit’ and, brilliantly, ‘I Resent That Snide Remark.’ Gosh, we barely even need to paint our walls – just looking at the website makes us happy!
