Dagny Thurmann-Moe & Maximalist Scandi Design. Looking Back to go Forward.

Amy:Color is the foundation of great design.  It can settle a building into its landscape. It can make an unattractive structural detail just disappear.  And it can change your mood in a room instantly.  Welcome to Let's Talk Color.  I'm Amy Krane, architectural color consultant at Amy Krane Color. I'm a color expert and use color to transform spaces and products from the ordinary to the sublime. As a paint color specialist, realtor, and design writer, I've got my finger on the pulse of what's happening in the world of color.  In each episode, I'll reveal best practices for choosing color by introducing you to masters of color for the built world.  So throw out those paint chips, tape to your walls, and let's get started.

I think I'm probably not alone confessing that sometimes I end up down a rabbit hole surfing on Instagram.  We all know that the algorithms have changed over the past few years, and it's a lot less fun than it was. But I used to be sent some really inspiring profiles I wouldn't have known about otherwise.  One of them was called Dagny Farga. I have to admit, not speaking Norwegian, I had no idea what those words meant. But I saw all of these colorful interiors, and I thought it was a paint brand. But no, it's the profile of Dagny Thurman Moe. Farga means color. I'm really excited to introduce you to Dagny, whom you can also hear speak on YouTube at a TEDx talk she gave. Dagny Thurman Moe is a leading Norwegian color designer and the founder of Koi Color and Design Studio. She and her team designs exteriors, interiors, products, and develop CMF strategies for brand syncing a stronger identity through color materials and finishes. Dagny is known for challenging the idea of timeless design, instead creating time-bound and aesthetically sustainable environments that reflect culture, history, and human needs. Welcome, Dagny

Dagny:Thank you so much. 

Amy:You have a lovely website. And besides what I mentioned, it looks like you've also done a collaboration with a company for wallpaper.  And you made a downloadable manual for applying color to schools, which is really interesting to me and we'll talk about.  And I think you've contributed color for a paint brand called Pure and Original Paint. Well, your interests are wide. What was your training?

Dagny:It was very far from what I do. So  I went to university and studied pedagogy, sociology and informatics. I am basically self-trained.

Amy:So how did the original projects come in, what taught you? How did it all get started then?

Dagny:This has actually been a lifelong kind of love story with colors.  And so from a very early age, as long as I can remember, you know, being like three, four, five years old, I was very much into the colors on my clothes. They were a very important form of communication for me. I used to change clothes, you know, due to where I was going. And that evolved into an interest for interiors and colors and interiors. So when I was like seven, my mom let me decorate my own room. Colors were super important. And around 15, 16, I started devouring. everything I could get my hands on when it came to research and books on interiors and colors. And I was just insatiable in a way. I could not get enough, but I never saw it as, you know, a possible career because who worked with colors, you know, no one. And there was no type of education that I could pick that up with, you know, to cater to exactly what I felt I needed.  And from, I would say my early twenties, I started reading the research and books on architecture and historical use of colors in architecture and arts. So I've read many, many, many books.

Amy:What were the first projects that came in for you?  Interior design, people liked how you design and they asked you to do their apartments or their houses?

Dagny:Well, kind of. I was pregnant with my first daughter, I started a blog that was about Scandinavian style from a maximalistic perspective.  This was around 2007 where, know, the gray-if-ication of Scandinavia in particular was, in full bloom and I hated it.  And everyone was saying, this is so Norwegian and so Scandinavian. And I was like, “it's really not. Look at the history.”  So that blog had readers from over hundred different countries and that I got a job as creative director for a paint brand in Norway with paint shops. So they sold paint and wallpapers and textiles.  And my job was  creating colors and color charts for interiors and facades and also doing these creative collaborations and helping the stores and picking out wallpaper designs and textiles.

Amy:That must have been heaven.

Dagny:Yes, it was. It was amazing. And I had a wonderful budget.

Amy:Incredible. You know, you're talking about something that I plan to talk about later today, but why not jump into it?  All of our understanding of Scandi design is white, pale gray, pale blue, Gustavian, all of that. You know, okay, I know that's Swedish. Yes, I've seen the photos of the waterfront in Copenhagen and you see those colorful buildings and yet the power of that idea of Scandi design is so strong that I also really believed that throughout time Scandinavian design, let's say interior and exterior, was all about those really pale colors. So when you're saying your blog was about maximalist Scandi design to me. It's like “what is that? “ Were you the only person (espousing that)?

Dagny:It probably wasn't just me, but I was I would say the loudest voice,  you know, the whiteness and the gray has nothing to do with Scandinavia at all. So we have no cultural historical references to gray being a popular color in any of the Scandinavian countries That is just the trend and that trend came from Belgian industrialism that we felt had a kind of a connection to Scandinavian minimalism that started in Denmark and Finland in the fifties. Denmark has been the whitest Scandinavian country, if we can call it that. Norway has very little history of using white in their interiors. There have been some shorter phases, but nothing that has lasted for more than a decade.  And if we look at Sweden, they have a really strong history with floral wallpapers, for example. They're the wallpaper nation of Scandinavia. Norway has been the most colorful country of the Scandinavian countries.  We've been, I would say, the country that had the least contact with the continent.  So we were all farmers and fisherman until we found the oil, basically. That's a simplification, of course. We have a really strong history with textiles and weaving and using bright and complex paint colors. We have the Rose paintings that were like incredibly bright and then the Stave churches, which are,  I think, our most important cultural icon. And of course we have Edvard Munch, the famous painter who was a master in using colors. 

Amy:Yeah, incredible  talented. You're in my office. I have these yellow-green walls. It's a color I really gravitate to. And I just changed my ceiling color from white to sort of a rose-peach color. This is the boldest mix of wall and ceiling that I've ever done. You know, you might do it too, but I use my own home to experiment. But in looking at photos, older photos on your Instagram I think I never saw a white ceiling in an interior. So is that you or is that Scandinavian or Norwegian tradition? Do you always put color on the ceiling?

Dagny:I would say that that is very much me. I have worked with creating interiors since 2007, 2008. I would say from 2010, we've worked with colors on the ceiling. It's the past 15 years of most of my career, I would say. The reason for that is that I feel that white is really harsh. It's not a part of the color wheel.  It's either the center or the end of the wheel. And if you want the room to feel harmonious and not like you have a white big like iceberg on top of your colored walls.  You need to put some color pigments in there.  And of course, this isn't something I invented.  Yeah, the inspiration I took was from historical interiors and looking at how they decorated their ceilings and what kind of color they used on the ceilings. So I just wanted to do my 2010 kind of version of it and it's turned out to be like a trademark for us.

Amy:Got it.

Dagny:I'm sitting in an apartment from the 50s right now and it has the same color on the ceiling. This is the fireplace living room and it has 250 centimeter high ceilings. My take on using colors on ceilings is first of all, we need to decide what kind of feeling and atmosphere we want in this room. I think that always focusing on light is not necessarily right for any space. Some spaces need to feel cozier and like a little safe cave.  A bedroom, for example. A room with a low ceiling height or the feeling of a low ceiling height with a colored ceiling can give you a cave feeling and give you much better sleep. So if you live in an apartment with a low ceiling height, you have a small bedroom and you have trouble sleeping, paint it all dark. Don't paint it black, but maybe a dark shade of green, for example, or blue or brown or brownish red or whatever, whatever kind of nuance or warmth or coolness you want in the room.  But if you are working on a room where it is important to have it light and airy, for example, we do use pigments on the ceiling, but we don't necessarily use very saturated colors if the ceiling height is low. So it can be more of a dusty kind of airy, light and airy tone, but never white.

Amy:Got it. Okay. Could you talk about time-bound design? How does it differ than trendy?  And if a design is tied to a particular point in time, then how does it not become dated later on?

Dagny:That's a good and important question because I really want to change how we think about decor and interiors and what it means to be a representative of an era. Because  if we look at historical interiors that we celebrate today, they're in no way timeless. They're very much time bound. We want to preserve and celebrate interiors that are the best representatives of the times they were made. So I think that you shouldn't be afraid to represent the 2020s or the 30s or the 10s. Just do it in a really high-quality way.  Do the best you think you can to represent that era with the patterns and textiles, we have. I think that the way our society is moving, we can't change our decor every 10 years. We need to, you know, live with our homes for, hopefully, my dream is that we create a home for someone and they keep it that way for the rest of their lives or for  the period they live in that home. If they need to add anything that’s OK, like art, or change the cover on a pillow if it's worn out, you know,  maybe you need a new light fixture or wall scones or whatever, you know, but just don't change the whole room.

Amy:Well, I mean, we do have such disposable societies. It comes out of materialism and capitalism and the fact that manufacturers want to keep selling, but it's so antithetical to environmentalism and it's antithetical to just the concept of quality.  It's really not a great change in society.

Dagny:I completely agree, and it's really unsustainable.

Amy:What's the makeup of your company? Are there other designers besides you, or are you the main designer and then you have support people?

Dagny:I am the creative director. I always pretty much have the vision for what we want to achieve in a project. And then I have a really talented interior architect and architects that contribute with their ideas and their competence.  And we work together in creating the projects that we do.  I always collaborate with one of them on a project. It's very rarely that I do it all by myself.

Amy:Got you. And they're actually trained architects and so someone might come to your company to build a new building from scratch?

Dagny:Yes. 

Amy:Ah, I didn't realize that. That's exciting. What countries have you had projects in? I mean, any kind,  from architecture to even interior design, someone's country house. I don't care. Where have you worked? 

Dagny:I’ve worked in England,  Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, of course. For the paint brand, they have suppliers in many different countries across the world.

Amy:They're not here in the States, are they?

Dagny:Yes, they uh have an agent for the US and Canada. It's Pure and Original paint. I think the Instagram handle is Pure and Original US Canada.  They're definitely available in the States and it's kind of lime paint. So the reason for why we wanted to work with them, I've worked with them since I started my company, which was in 2014,  is that they only use natural color pigments and it's just not plastic paint. Paint basically, as you know, has plastic color pigments and plastic binder.  So it's really been a joy working with them and they're a Belgian or a Dutch  brand.  They’re really known for their shades of gray and white and beige.  And then they let us, or me at the time, dig through their archival colors, they had so many amazing colors. So we've been working on making their unknown colors famous. 

Amy:Got it. That's great.  Neutrals for exteriors and interiors are considered culturally as a sign of sophistication and good taste. Is it the same way where you live? Do you feel you're constantly battling a public perception, but also specific requests of your clients to go neutral and you have to kind of push them to use more color?  Or do you think because you're known as this person who emphasizes colorfulness the people who come to you already know what they're going to get.

Dagny:I think they already know what they're going to get.  And if someone comes to us and says that we want something conservative, that's white or gray. I'm like, first of all, that's not conservative. That's just not knowing history.  And secondly, we don't do white or gray. So then you'll have to work with someone else who does.

Amy:Okay. So yeah. So that means even for projects where you've been involved in the color for exteriors,  even on exteriors, ah there isn't a beige, tan, earth tone. If you were to  consider neutrals, whites and grays and beige and off-white and black, but also some earth tones,  know, tan and mushroom and colors like that, never.

Dagny:We've worked with some beige, tones of beige, and we can  work on finding a good white, but then that white will have color pigments in it. It will not be like a harsh white. Yeah. And  when we work with facade colors, we're not really into what's been popular for the past 20 years. And I talked to this with our clients.  I say we're into what will last the next 400 years, you know, and what others that have been relevant and returning again  and and again for the past 400 years.  So if you tell me that white is a classic, you don't know our history, you know,  and it's not a classic. It's,  it's, it's not timeless. And it irritates me when someone thinks that it's timeless or when they think that it's sophisticated. And  I've had this discussion so many times about, you know, eh but why  is  more elegant and so many have been  inspired by ancient  Greece, for example, with the columns and the marble architecture.  And  the fact is that those palaces, they weren't white.  No, they looked like they came straight out of a Disney movie. oh  The colors are all gone. It's so amazing. Yeah.  And you know what happened  during the late,  like the end of  the  1800s, like around 1890, 95, archaeologists started finding these structures.  And when they found traces of paint, they actually removed those traces because they didn't want history to be the way it actually was.  Yeah, they removed the traces of colors that they found because they wanted to keep this idea and ideal of Greek classicism. Of classicism being white.

Amy:Yeah, interesting. Wow. I had no idea. That's fascinating. I've heard you,  I've heard some interviews and I of course listen to your TED talk.  One thing that really stood out is that using slightly different terminology,  you talked about something that I talk about all the time that came out of my training with the International Association of  Color Consultants and Designers, which is that for an interior to be comfortable and relatable to a human, what we should be aiming to do,  is to create a color palette that is like nature with a mixture  of different hues, saturation and value. That in one eyeful, you get a mix of all of it.  Not to the point that it's  crazy, overstimulating, confusing, because that will cause anxiety, a sort of moderate amount of all of that. And I've heard you talk about similar ideas, although  when I think about that,  I think about it and utilize that for interiors, but I have a sense that you utilize that concept for everything that you work on.  Could you talk about biophilia, nature, and humans' need for color from your perspective?

Dagny:Yes, biophilia is a really important color cornerstone, I would say, in how we work and what we work with.  And it is actually exactly what  you work with as well  in the way you describe it.  So  when using colors, it needs to be uh layered in a sense. If you look out on a forest  with trees, for example,  you will see thousands of nuances of green. It's not just one shade.  And when we work with green inside,  we also need it to be layered, for example. We need to add more nuances of either green or any other color that  works in a harmonious way.  But we also work with, we know that for example, green plants or plants in general are important for our wellbeing. We know that it reduces our sick leave from work, for example. We know that it calms us and it increases our ability to focus and concentrate.  We also know that and natural materials, especially wood that hasn't been lacquered to death,  touch it, your pulse sinks.  So you become calmer. And when it comes to lighting, for example, there's something called human-centric lighting where  the lighting follows  the natural rhythm of the day, which is also something that increases our wellbeing  inside. When we work on a facade, we also want  to have this variation in how  or the color of the facades  look. So  if we think of a little village  with lots of cute houses in different colors,  if you start analyzing that little village, you'll see that most of the architecture is really  monotonous in a sense. It looks very similar. There are not many different types of architecture or style directions, but you have difference in details like detailing and colors on the facades and the doors and the plants. And that creates a space that feels really warm and welcoming to us. We work with on a modern area or street or a large  housing  projects  with many, many buildings. Our goal is always to  combine colors that vary in nuance and saturation and hue,  like you mentioned. We know that that increases  the human level of curiosity. If an environment is very monotonous where all the façades are glass or steel, for example, they're all white or gray,  we become more indifferent to our surroundings. We become less interested in investigating  and getting to know  that environment.  And that is because there's not much to rest your eyes on and there's not much to find  or   So,  yeah, we work with exactly the same outdoors as we do indoors, but the nuances and the actual colors that we use,  not the colors, but the nuances are very different from the ones we use inside because,  for example, we have very blue daylight, which highly affects colors when you bring them outside. A color that can look amazing  inside can look crazy when you put it on a large facade.

Amy:Do you tend to use more warm colors or cool colors or always a mix of both on exteriors in Norway? 

Dagny:I would say 80 % is warm colors. So nuances of red and yellow and that includes like pink and terracotta and red and Very little orange actually, which I think is a bit sad because Copenhagen has like the best orange facades in the world. And it's difficult to get Norwegian homeowners to go there. But yeah, we do that. So the red and yellow groups of facade color are the ones that have lived in Norway for the longest. period of time. And people have been explaining that with the fact that it's the cheapest pigments. Historically, not after plastic paint because the cheapest is white, which was the most expensive free plastic paint. Those two colors are the two colors that are missing from our surroundings during winter. when the light becomes even bluer than it is during summer and all of the colors are removed from our nature. It just becomes gray and dead.  And we know that color is energy and the warmest colors like reds, oranges and yellows have the longest  light waves which again gives us the most energy that we are missing because of our blue daylight and green during winter daylight. So  I believe that the reason for the two color groups popularity has much more to do about health and our previous intuitive understanding of what we need with our surroundings. You can also see that with how architecture was designed  before the fifties. And  we do use greens,  a lot of greens actually. It's the third most popular color in Norway throughout times for facades. And blue is a very tricky color here because we have blue dyes.  So it can become fluorescent. 

Amy:That's so interesting. Also forgive my ignorance, because it kills me, I haven't been there yet.  just thinking back to the photos I've seen over time, and I'm hoping this isn't just Sweden, and it's Norway and Sweden and even Finland. I'm thinking about the older wooden homes that I see out in the countryside,  up on the islands.  What stands out for me, old wooden houses, black bright yellow and red, that Falun red. So are black, yellow and red popular colors in all of the Scandinavian  countries or am I just thinking Sweden?

Dagny:Black is not really common, but you have a very, very dark brown. Is it called tar in English? Kind of like a treatment of wood panels with tar, which makes them a brownish black.  It can look black, but it's brown. So yes, I would say that those are the most popular facade colors in pretty much every country that is placed in the same section of planet Earth. North, If you look at Greenland, you will see the same colors. Where do you start when you're working on color for a large exterior? 

Amy:Let's say, I don't know if you do more new builds or they come to you because it's an older community or building or set of buildings and they need a facelift, they need a renovation. So where do you start when designing? Obviously you have to start with the architecture, have to start with the purpose of the buildings and the surrounding and all of that stuff. But thinking about color, where do you start? What's your process? 

Dagny:We work with both historical buildings, like from the 1650s  to future architecture that hasn't been built  yet. And we always start with the surroundings. Often we map the surroundings and we do an aesthetic analysis of the colors and materials we see in the surrounding  areas and streets and the actual street that building or the project is. And it depends on the size of the building. You know, we have different strategies and using colors.  If it's a small wooden house, you know, we very often complexify the palettes for the past 20, 30 years. You know, a lot of them have been painted white or gray or whatever with white windows. And that's just wrong when you look at history. So we try to reintroduce the historical principles on how to create a color palette for this type of architecture.  When it comes to larger buildings, like,   above two stories and up to 14, 15. We try to figure out how to make this volume look smaller.  We very often split up volumes into maybe two or three sections and we often split them up both horizontally and vertically depending on the size.  Because we try to create like a human scale even if it's not there. You know, color can be a really powerful tool in making a structure seem smaller than it is. So I often say that contemporary architects are experts at making large structures seem bigger than they are and we want to make them smaller. And we think that's really important for a good surroundings for humans. 

Amy:One project of yours I really love were those, that set of row houses in Oslo. They started off a sort of tan color, tan beige, covered in graffiti, and they weren't old.  And you really, it was an incredible transformation.  The colors you chose, I would not call them pastel, but were not very saturated. They were sort of light mid-tone. At least that's how they appeared in photos.  A couple of the houses seemed larger, slightly bigger architecture than the others.  The terraces were in different places.  And it seemed like those larger houses got slightly lighter colors, which was very interesting. They all had inset doorways. So the volume pushed back for the doorway. And you added color to the walls of the inset as well as the front doors. But how you treated each inset entranceway was different. So it was not uniform. For instance, from what I recall, one of them had a super striking, intense cobalt blue front door where others had more mid-tone, less saturated front doors. So I thought that was a really interesting approach to how you added color to these houses. And I wondered if you could talk about why you gave up on this idea of symmetry for each interior entranceway.  They are equally saturated, even though different colors, and why you varied it up like that? What was the idea?

Dagny:That's actually a biophilia. So it's all about creating something where you as a walker by feel like there's something to discover here. It's really important that it doesn't feel like there is a system is not systematic in any sense. I wanted it to feel randomized, but still kind of like related. So it feels good to look at, but it doesn't really, you can't really make sense of it, but it still makes sense. And I think that...We work like that with very many of the projects we do, because I feel that that is what we need from our cities. We need them to be interesting and we need them to be, make us think.  When you walk on the sidewalk, you walk by these houses, there is something new to see from every single entrance when these houses were painted, we got, and people understood that it was us that were doing it, we got so many messages and thank you notes and people saying that they'd changed their route to work, for example, because they just wanted to pass this. It felt so good to look at. I

Amy:t's almost like candy colors.

Dagny:It's actually historical paint colors. The base colors are historical, inspired from the wooden houses in Grinne Ljokka, which is  an area in Oslo  with a lot of older buildings and we've combined those with more contemporary colors or colors that are more available with modern paint.  This is something we often do. We take historical colors and nuances and we mix them with contemporary because we want that little touch of the time we're in  but we still wanted to be connected to the surroundings so that 10 years or 15 years from now, it will still make sense  that those houses have those colors on them.

Amy:Got it. I really like how you handle saturation and intensity of colors on exteriors. I think it's one of the hardest things to work out.  I mean, we all run to hue, you know, that it's gonna be pink, it's gonna be terracotta, it's gonna be green.  But these nuances really make or break the design and also affect the combination of the colors hugely. It's not just about green next to pink, it's about what green next to what pink. And I feel that that's something you've really, really learned well and excel at. I don't know if it's something you can articulate or not.  Can you talk about how you choose the chromaticity or saturation of a color for an exterior? 

Dagny:For an exterior, we always use  less saturation and chromaticity than you think you want.  The color becomes more up on a facade. But we know that we can take more color, for example, on the first floor or the ground floor. We know that we can handle more colors on details, for example. We have a lot of experience with what nuances work on a building and what doesn't. And what works on a large building and what doesn't.  We want when we work with a city, example, and an apartment complex with commercial spaces on the ground floor, for example, we want that ground  floor to be really beautiful and stunning and maybe just calm it down a bit when we move up.  And I would say it's all about using very dusty colors mainly, but not too dusty. It's a combination because when we work with yellows, for example, we can use a lot of chromaticity and saturation, but when we work with the green, we can barely have anything. 

Amy:Interesting. Are you always using this for exteriors? Are you always using the same paint brand because you like that paint?

Dagny:No, no. The project dictates what paint to use and what type of material. So sometimes we can work with... oils for example or bricks and then we combine that with maybe lime paint. We have very many different products that we work with and very many different fan decks and then we also have our own samples which we have a lot of and sometimes we try to  use a new color for  n exterior, lavender, for example, which is incredibly uncommon. We're like, want to put lavender on a big apartment complex.  And then we try to, and then our goal is to make it work and feel completely natural together, more historical reds or yellows or brick colors, for example. Yeah.

Amy:Fabulous. When you think about these historical buildings in Scandinavia being these colorful buildings, these reds and terracottas and yellows, and I see a lot of pink, you use a lot of pink, I love pink. Do you get a lot of pushback from people, we don't want pink?  Because I've seen some just beautiful pink buildings that you've done. Is it rare or no? 

Dagny:The reason for why we do a lot of pink is that it has been a historically significant color that has been completely removed from our cities and streets and buildings. We often call what we do kind of like city repair or street repair. We can see that we have a really beautiful yellow facade here, for example, and next to that would be perfect with red. Or we have a brick building here and it would really work well with a pink. When we have people saying that we don't want a pink facade, I just say it's a light terracotta. 

Amy:That is so great.  It reminds me when I send my colors. This is for a residence. When I send the color chart with the colors to my client for remote jobs when I'm not in the same place and then order color samples and have them sent to them, I always tell them these two things. Do not look the colors up online. They are not accurate. They'll just bias you unnecessarily. And please ignore the names because  every other name in a Benjamin Moore fan deck is such and such gray, such and such gray, and they're not. They're just muted versions of a real hue.  And if you see gray, you go running away, but I told you I don't want gray. Ignore the names. So it's very funny. There you are saying, call that pink a terracotta and you'll get away with it, right? Yes. Let's switch gears for a minute.  That manual for color for schools.  Were you employed to come up with a manual or were you asked to create color for schools and from that came a manual? 

Dagny:Now I actually worked with colors for schools and then we have kind of a set of rules and guides called Universal Design, which is about creating public spaces that are welcoming and easy to interpret for most people or everyone. So if you have issues with your eyes or if you can't hear or whatever, you can still read the room.  And a company that worked with that contacted me and they're like, we want to get funds to create a guide for the use of color in schools and we want to do it with you.  And I was like, yes, I have been talking about this for so long. You know, we used to do courses together with four architects and interior architects and how to use something called luminance contrast, which is an important part of this universal design set of rules. Yeah, it was a really wonderful project. I wanted it to be easier for architects and interior architects to use or choose colors for the different types of rooms so that they would be completely sure would work.  Because there's a gap in competence for these roles. There hasn't been a lot of focus on colors in  the education of interior architects and architects for decades. They just didn't know what to choose and what colors would actually work. We wanted to make it really simple and picked out the best color codes to use for the different types of rooms in a school. And that guide has been so popular. It's widely used today. We still get feedback.

Amy:Incredible. That's incredible.  Did you  use studies because studies have been made about color for schools and how different colors work for different age children?  So did you factor that in?

Dagny:It's actually it's difficult to use all of that research to perfect it because you can only work on  the large surfaces and the furniture.  But we do as well as we can to make it easy to make choices that fit the age groups. Research has been used both for schools and hospitals and other kinds of institutions because they often point in the same direction. So it gives extra safety and making the right choice.

Amy:Got it. Okay. Do you want to just give us some just very basic principles that you applied, the guidelines that you came up with regarding color?

Dagny:When we work with elementary schools, it's really important to make a space that feels safe.  So, maybe it doesn't feel that much like a warehouse like most of Norwegian schools do today. They feel very, very sterile. So, we often have to use vinyl flooring, for example. What we often do in the classrooms is to use vinyl that looks like wood flooring. It creates like a soft straw atmosphere and it's fake flooring. I know that most architects hate fake surfaces that pretend it's something else than what it actually is. But it has a really important effect. It's the feeling of something more natural. Then on the walls in classrooms, we know what colors to use for focus and concentration, the colors that are the best. So like dusty light shades of blue or green or bluish-green. It's really important that they're not too bright.  So they have to  not be very saturated.  With chairs, for example, they can have brighter colors on them.  And for the desks, the absolute best choice is wooden. Which is calming.  For the public spaces where they're moving from classroom to classroom or from different types of rooms, we want it to be really warm.  When you make fitted furniture for those classrooms with the muted colors on the walls, use bright but calmer colors on the fitted furniture. Try to get green plants in there which is something we've worked a lot on achieving because we know that for kids it really reduces outbursts in the classroom to have of a lot of green plants in there. So that's also an important factor. We try to implement something that gives you a feeling of wonder.  like curiosity,  something that you can experience that is, you know, I think that that feeling of wonder is something that we don't work with a lot or enough in today's society. And it's really important for kids to have that curiosity both when it comes to learning and just life itself. 

Amy:Well, I was going to ask you what have you not worked on yet that you hope to?  You kind of mentioned a lavender building, is there anything else, you know, not necessarily a color, but a kind of project, anything like that?

Dagny:This is something that is going to happen, but that I'm really excited for. It's the government that builds, or the local government in Oslo that is responsible for building and running  retirement homes or nursing homes. We are going into a big research project with them,  where we work on seeing how the environments affect life quality. And that is so exciting and we're going to work with both color on the walls, type of furniture, art, plants, lighting.  So that's a project I'm really excited about.  Other than that, I would say that we would love to do a hotel which is more like a luxury thing. It's like the opposite of a nursing home. So  I really  like working, like you said, extremely different things. And  the most  meaningful projects are often when we work with institutions. 

Amy:Yeah. What a fantastic career. Thank you so much for speaking with me. I really  enjoyed it.

Dagny:Thank you. was  such a good conversation. I feel like we could talk for hours and hours. 

Amy:And I have to say, orange and pink is probably my favorite combination. And just being able to look at you in that hot pink shirt with that terracotta wall behind you, it's really been fantastic.