Will the lions eat us all?

Beige, for the love of God.

I have a severe problem with beige.

And before half the design world comes for me: beige itself is perfectly innocent.
Some of my best friends are beige. Haha ok, nej they're not.

Beige can be beautiful. Warm. Sophisticated. Calm. All those lovely things. 

But hey, you all know the look. Beige walls, chairs, curtains. Some texture. A slightly teeny tiny darker beige rug, because someone got adventurous. Maybe a little greige if things got REALLY wild. Everything matches, very tasteful, very correct.

And absolutely n o t h i n g happens. No tingeling nowhere.

What I have a problem with is this beige camouflaging as automatically good design:
NO i say.
Beige is NOT equivalent to good taste. 
Beige is NOT equivalent to being timeless.

But what the heck is it then?? A good guess spells fear. Yup, fear.
Beige is equivalent to fear. (Now I can hear the design world stomping closer, out to get me haha.. But hey, hear me out!)

It’s not an odd thing really. We are still animals deep inside after all. We want to follow the flock, be safe on the savanna. To seek safeness as our inner animals is natural, safe is equivalent to not being eaten by predators for lunch. 

But lets be a bit real here, we dont live in fur hides on the savanna anymore now do we?
We can risk being a bit outside our comfort zone whiteout fearing lions gobbling on our limbs.

So, what to do then, about the beige epidemic?

For someone who bangs on about colour as much as I do, I don't actually believe the answer is:
PAINT EVERYTHING PINK!
Fun. But nej.

Lets say we do it this way instead:
When I start a project, I want to understand the business first. Whats the purpose of the room.
Get to the core.
Answer these questions:

-Who are we trying to attract?
-Why should they choose this place?
-What should happen when they walk through the door?
-Where should they naturally move?
-Where should they stop?
-What should they discover?
-How should the staff use the space?
-How do we create memories?
-How do we create repeat visits?

And perhaps my favourite question:
What can we do here that nobody else would dare to do?

THEN we design.

If the core is beige, then so be it. Let’s paint the whole shebang in beige. 

But it often turns out, after all the brain gymnastics above I painfully drag my clients through, that it’s usually something else.
Sometimes the core is colour and sometimes it's an absurdly oversized object. A strange material. Or maybe a hidden room. A ridiculously beautiful bar. Something deliberately out of scale. 

(Then of course your room has other important work do to:
-Staff need to move.
-Guests need to move and to understand where they're going.
-Products need to be discovered.
-Tables need to function.
-The bar needs to perform when everything goes absolutely bananas at 8 PM on a Saturday.-And so on
But thats a different story and a different blogpost :D)

So, use beige if you must, but use it deliberately, not just to be safe! 

I dare you to go outside the comfort zone. I promise you, no lions will eat you, and it will be a totally different result with core memories to be made.