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Creating a calm environment in healthcare settings can benefit patients, visitors and staff. Dulux Trade Colour of the Year 2027 and the Light palette can create quiet, cleansing backdrops in hospitals, clinics and medical centres to help reduce stress and enhance healing. Find out how.
Any medical facility must function well to be clinically effective but, today, healthcare providers have additional priorities. Aware that the design of hospitals and treatment centres can dramatically influence patient wellbeing and outcomes, they want to offer spaces that go beyond the merely functional needs of their users.
‘Healing architecture’ hinges on design that promotes wellbeing and mental sustainability. Quiet and sensory comfort is a key factor here and could help create calm, reduce overstimulation and promote relaxation1 in healthcare settings. In psychiatric hospitals, particularly, it is important to create a pleasant and friendly space that will positively impact the wellbeing of people suffering from various types of mental illness2. Dementia patients, too, can benefit from stress reducing interior design in medical facilities as it could help reduce anxiety and agitation3.
Colour is an integral part of any restorative scheme, and can help turn what could be a sterile, institutional space into somewhere approachable and calming. Indeed, research has shown that certain colour schemes, incorporating greens and blues, can actively help reduce stress.
We recommend Dulux Trade Light colour story with its combination of fluid tones for healthcare spaces. This palette, used with the soft sage Dulux Trade Colour of the Year 2027, can help create a gentle, uncomplicated visual environment that feels calming and easy on the eye.
The distinctive yet harmonious tones of this colour story are also useful for colour-coding medical facilities. Using different Light colours for operating theatres, wards, cafeterias and corridors, for example, can help patients, staff and visitors navigate healthcare spaces more easily.
1. Top principles of healing architecture you should know, Aesthetic Designs, May 2025.
2. User Well-Being as a Paramount Challenge in Contemporary Built Environment Design: The Architecture of Psychiatric Hospitals and Its Influence on Treatment Processes and the Health, Safety, and Comfort of Patients and Medical Staff—A Systematic Literature, MDPI, February 2025
3. Human Centric design 2.0, AkzoNobel
Creating calming spaces in medical interiors can help improve staff wellbeing and reduce stress. Here, walls are painted in soft tones from the Light colour story – a pale grey-brown and the warm Dulux Trade Colour of the Year 2027, Soulful Sage™. The window frames, picked out in a deeper brown, draw the eye to the natural world outside, aiding relaxation.
Clear wayfinding is crucial in medical facilities to avoid patients and visitors feeling stressed or confused. Colour-coding using a palette of harmonious colours can help identify different parts of a building while keeping the overall interior design scheme cohesive. Here, different tones of the Dulux Trade Light Colour Story clearly signpost the different storeys of a hospital interior.
In the past, medical facilities were often cold, clinical spaces but, today, the best hospital design is human-centric, taking the needs of patients, staff and visitors into account. Here, Dulux Trade Colour of the Year Soulful Sage™ is mixed with a warm brown from the Light Colour Story and natural wood to create a multisensory treatment space that feels calm and recuperative.
Natural and understated, the quiet colours of the Dulux Trade Light Colour Story can create a functional, aesthetic and elegant exterior for any medical facility. Used in combination, they can make a building impactful while keeping it in tune with its surroundings.
Find out how Dulux Trade Colour of the Year and 2027 colour stories can also transform education spaces, offices environments and hospitality settings.
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