Fearne Cotton's colour tips for creating a happier home
Fearne Cotton shares how she uses colour as a mood booster to make herself feel good at home
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I’m a pretty sensitive person. I’m affected by the people I’m with, the words spoken and energetically what's going around me. Luckily in the home we can manipulate the feel and energy with colour and print. With a simple brush stroke of paint or newly upholstered chair we can create totally new atmospheres and choose how we want that room to make us feel.
When we moved into our family home nearly eight years ago I felt mentally overwhelmed with the prospect of a wedding a month away (what were we thinking?) and an 18 month old in tow. My brain overload led to a rather neutral pallet in the home in an attempt to quell the chaos. I imagined white walls and bare wooden floors would help calm my rattled nervous system. It may have helped a little but over the years I’ve realised that colour and pattern can also create a heavenly tranquility, too.
As time whizzed by the rooms in our home have incrementally been peppered with colour and print. From our floral wallpapered front-room in pink and green that gives you the feeling of a country garden, to our conservatory which has its wooden panels handsomely painted in deep midnight blue with light, powdery pink walls nearby. Pink features heavily in our home as I’ve learned it’s a colour that makes me feel relaxed and cosy, so much so that two years ago I painted our bedroom a deep petal pink which looks fresh and chic in the daytime yet envelopes you in comfort as the night draws in.
Sophie Robinson has also been responsible for much of my experimenting with colour – her Instagram is a buffet for the colour deprived. I’m inspired by her clashing prints and sumptuous colour combinations. She once told me that she’d given her son a colour chart so he could pick the colour of his bedroom walls. Knowing how much colour affects me I realised I needed to give my kids the same opportunity to choose their own environment. Rex instantly pointed to an ocean coloured swatch for his walls due to his sea life obsession. His room is now a cool, cosy cave of aquatic glory.
My house has little fluidity from room to room. There is no cohesion of colour or print. Each room has its own style and atmosphere created with colour block walls and a mix match of pillows. My downstairs loo is quite literally it’s own little world! I tend to think bathrooms or downstairs toilets can be a fun playground of pattern and colour where anything goes. Our loo is one of my favourite spots in the house with wisteria wallpaper in pink and bright emerald tiles on the floor. It’s a tiny glamorous shrine that everyone loves visiting.
Whether it’s floral prints to energise, tones of blue to calm or green to bring the outside in, resist following the trends which will inevitably come and go, and instead work with colours and prints that make you feel good.
Fearne Cotton is one of the best known and most popular broadcasters in the UK and is most recently known as the Founder of the wellbeing brand, Happy Place. The brand was created from her first book released in 2017, Happy, which was a Sunday Times Bestseller and a silver Nielsen Bestseller. This was the first in a series of books talking about her own, and some of the not so positive, experiences with happiness. This was also the premise for her podcast launched in 2018, Happy Place, and has featured an array of guest such as Ellie Golding, Hilary Rodham Clinton, Jada Pinkett Smith, Russell Brand, Gary Barlow, Alicia Keys, and Elizabeth Gilbert amongst others. To date, the podcast has over 59 million downloads and continues to top the charts. 2019 saw a further extension of the brand into the live space, with over 10,000 people attending two Happy Place Festivals, one in the north and one in the south of England. The Festival went virtual in 2020, running over for month featuring around 150 pieces of content. The Festivals return later on this summer to Chiswick House & Gardens and Tatton Park.
Her third children’s book Your Mood Journal was published in the November 2020, and her most recent book Bigger Than Us, was published in January this year. In 2021 Fearne also launched Happy Place Books, which has already published some amazing works by Lawrence Okolie & Dr Olivia Remes.
Fearne is a mother of two, and step-Mother of two, and closely supports a range of charities - most notably mental health charity Mind, The Prince’s Trust and Coppafeel!, the latter of which she curates the charity’s music festival, Festifeel.
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