Check Out These 4 Design Projects Inspired By Spring’s Colorful Flora

Thinking about spring paint colors? Spring has sprung bringing with it a renewed sense of optimism, freedom and love of our natural surroundings. These tenants of springtime call to mind our Solibre 2021 Color + Design Trends report, which tells a color story of overcoming our fears and transferring negative emotions into a new freedom of ideas for sustainable practices, self-optimization and adaptive design. Much of Solibre’s palette of yellows, oranges and dusty roses also shares a common bond with desert flora, especially the yellow and orange hued blooms that come alive after the west’s rainy season. This got us thinking about all the ways desert flora have inspired other design projects.

Here are a few that caught out eye:

JTH Tucson

Photo Credit: BETHANY NAUERT PHOTOGRAPHY

After the success Sara and Rich Combs saw from their Joshua Tree House project, they set their sights on rehabbing an abandoned five bedroom inn in Tucson, Arizona. Their Posada, now named JTH Tucson, is 10,000-square-feet in size and sets on the edge of Saguaro National Park. The Combs sought to take as much inspiration from the surrounding environment for the property as they could, literally taking a fan deck of Dunn-Edwards paint colors into the desert, laying it in the sand next to the native plant life in order to find the most natural colors for their design project.

Photo Credits: KINLAKE and Linda Pappa

They ended up with a color palette of tan shades like Warm Hearth (DE6110), Adobe South (DEC709), and a mustard gold Laredo Road (DE5369) for contrast. To add a unique identity to each of JTH Tucson's five suites, the couple enlisted the help of artist Linda Pappa, who painted desert plants and iconography on the doors of each room and a slithering snake over the master bedroom fireplace.

The Saguaro Hotel

In the low desert, Palm Springs’ iconic Saguaro Hotel used a kaleidoscope of native desert plants as inspiration for their joyful, vibrant exterior color palette. In partnership with Dunn-Edwards Paints, The Saguaro performed a facelift on its exterior to highlight the hotel’s original fourteen hues which took cues from the plant life found within California’s Colorado Desert, colors originally envisioned by the hotel’s architects, Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat. The bold array of paint colors are a defining characteristic of the Palm Springs hotel and help set the tone for guests regarding the playful sensibility of their stay.

Harvest Moon Hideaway

photo credit: DRP STUDIOS

Design duo Paul and Becky Heintz of Local Studio Interiors were drawn to desert living and and transformed a cabin that needed a lot of work. What was once a shell of a cabin filled with mounds of trash became a fresh, polished and comfortable abode filled with eclectic treasures. An important part of achieving this very vibe was for the open kitchen to resonate with the cabin’s desert surroundings. Becky loved the faded green of the desert Creosote bush so they picked Shutters (DET519), a similar green shade, for their new kitchen cabinetry.

Oeste

photo credit: claire thomas

We recently caught up with Claire Thomas, a design creative and Dunn-Edwards collaborator, who took us into her latest house project called Oeste, a home situated on five acres in Joshua Tree. The saturated pink, yellow and red hues in the desert home’s bedrooms were chosen for their ability to transport guests to ancient towns in Mexico and Marrakesh. The overall color palette is infused with spicy warm shades, and one room was painted in faded green Antique Coin (DE6270), a hue inspired by the agave plants that grow outside the bedroom windows.

photo credit: claire thomas

Digging these warm shades and want to learn how to implement them in your own space? Take a look at our primer on tan and brown paint colors as nice neutrals to inspire you.