How a family’s outback road trip inspired this year’s colour trends

It was always going to be an unforgettable adventure for a young family – an epic road trip that would traverse thousands of kilometres of the vast and breathtakingly beautiful Australian outback.

But for Wendy Rennie, colour and concept manager for Haymes Paint, the three-month-long getaway with her husband Shane and their sons Leo, 10, and Hugo, six, also proved unexpectedly fruitful. It provided her with the inspiration for Haymes Paint’s 2021 ‘Grounded’ colour range – a quintessentially Australian, nature-inspired palette.

“Australian landscapes are some of the most dramatic and raw in the world,” says Rennie. “It wasn’t until I actually travelled the country that I knew I had to use these tones in our annual colour forecast.”

For the family, now based in Hervey Bay in Queensland, the journey began in Melbourne, where they were living at the time.

“We decided to take a full school term off and head away,” says Rennie, who originally hails from New Zealand. “It’s always been something we wanted to do.

It was landscapes like these that inspired Rennie when creating the annual colour forecast for Haymes Paint. Photo: iStock

“We went from Melbourne up through South Australia and the middle of Australia to Alice Springs and Uluru, then Darwin, before making our way across to Townsville, Cairns and all the way back down to Melbourne.

“We had planned to spend much more time driving along the coast, but we fell in love with the dirt roads, the trees and the bush in central Australia. There also seemed to be a real community of people with a like-minded reason for wanting to travel. And there were so many hidden treasures and gorgeous little places to discover in the middle of nowhere.”

Source: https://www.domain.com.au/living/how-a-familys-outback-road-trip-inspired-this-years-colour-trends-1035674/