Sauna Color
I just completed this bright blue, yellow, and white gem of a sauna situated on a red deck. The color was the client’s choice; he wanted something that would brighten things up and be in stark contrast with the usual suspects of taupe, dull brown, and moldy blues that afflict his neighborhood and so many other American housing developments. Why are builders so afraid of color?
The use of bright color in homes is often associated with places like seaside Baltic towns and Reykjavíc, Iceland—and for good reason. In the deep of winter these places are plunged into darkness as the sun hovers near the horizon or barely makes an appearance at all. Battling the winter blues makes the use of bright colors almost mandatory. Of course these places all have saunas (or in the case of Reykjavíc, massive public hot springs), another way to survive the depth of winter. I learned when I was an artist-in-residence in Nova Scotia that fishermen traditionally used bright colors in their houses simply because it was a way to use left-over boat paint. Boats are painted brightly so they can be uniquely identified at sea, so in a way, the house colors express something unique about the individuals who live within. Now, of course, the brightly colored fishing village is almost a tourist mandate.
Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients: from authentic dark-brown Viking tar to blue-grey, then brighter reds and blues and greens, and now this latest color feast. There is also a trend in current design to use more bright colors such as on the eye-popping florescent orange running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee. She writes about creating joy with color in her book The Aesthetics of Joy. She is persuasive about using more color for the simple reason that it creates joy. Although I teach color theory, I have a tendency to stick to blacks, grays, and low intensity colors in my art, a trend that I have been trying to evolve out of. Perhaps I can take some cues from my clients and take some color risks in my own work. This latest sauna project actually makes me think of late Mondrian paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie in which he reduced his palette to the three primary colors and sought to use color as the basis for expression.
In this latest sauna project my interest in sauna and art actually converged. The warm interior heats your body, and the colorful exterior warms your spirit. Thanks, Karl!
