colour rich gift

A combination of donated paint from Resene and Vectorworks Designer software, enabled interior designer Frances Fraser to realise her vision for her makeover of Wellington’s Ronald McDonald House for a colour-infused sanctuary that embraces families of children in need of medical care.

Her inspiration for Ronald McDonald House was an image of sunlight filtering through a canopy of leaves. Using the Resene Colour Palette Generator tool on the Resene website, Frances imported photos she had taken of sunlit leaves and flowers – cabbage trees, pohutukawa, flax flowers, puka puka, leucadendron, kowhai and grasses – and extracted their key colours. These she edited until she had a palette that offered enough depth to cover the variety of spaces but still worked as a family of hues and tones.

Close to Wellington Hospital, Ronald McDonald House provides free accommodation and support to out-of-town families who have a child requiring medical treatment. The underpinning ethic is that children cope better and recover better if their families are nearby. With so much to think about, the last thing families need is to be worrying about where they might stay. And colour is important to families when they are seeking a retreat from the hospital – it can be uplifting and restorative, both visually and emotionally.

The four-storey Ronald McDonald House covers 3500 square metres of floor space and includes several lounges, a communal kitchen and dining room, a computer room, gym, theatre, art room, offices and a meeting room as well as two levels of accommodation.

The design considers all the dimensions of the interior spaces, drawing on colour, light, graphics, form and layering to provide a hopeful, contemplative, comforting and all-enveloping ambiance. Vectorworks software helped her deliver on this colour challenge and was used for all concept plans, detailing, designing joinery, furniture planning, modelling 3D visuals and perspective drawings incorporating colour.

Resene’s full range of colours is embedded in Vectorworks software, Frances’s preferred CAD software since she studied for her Graduate Diploma in Design (Spatial). The splitting of the Resene paint colours into ranges made colour selection easy and more accurate combined with importing images of carpets, wallpapers and fabrics into the Vectorworks software to create textures for the designs. With planning for the refit completed, Frances can reflect on a very rewarding and exciting project.

Interior Designer: Francis Fraser, Honour Creative
Vectorworks: www.megabits.co.nz
Resene Colour Palette Generator
From the Resene News – issue 3/2012

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