Colour confidence

From the Resene/Your Home and Garden Colour Home Awards Competition - 2005 Grand Winner

Helen Wake’s energetic transformation of her Warkworth villa makes her our Resene Colour Home Awards winner

Helen Wake began painting with bold colour when she and her husband Dave bought this relocated villa in its Warkworth setting 18 months ago. And she hasn’t stopped since! Helen loved its high stud, the story of its previous location next to the cathedral in Parnell, Auckland and its rural location for their three boys Jackson (five), Griffin (three) and Zac (one), but she hated its all-cream interior décor.

Right: Resene ‘Dynamite’ adds drama to the dining room walls. The red/green combination picks up the tones of the faux cactus and in Helen’s own artwork.

Hallway and dining room
Left: Resene ‘Hillary’ lines Helen’s hallway and looks stunning alongside the red of the dining room.

“I thought: ‘What have we done?’ But I knew I just needed to paint, so there I was pregnant with Zac up a ladder, on a bookcase just painting.” Her first project was the library that is painted in Resene ‘Donkey Brown’, the second her hallway in Resene ‘Hillary’ alongside her Resene ‘Dynamite’ dining room that made her the monthly winner in July. Since then she has painted the main bedroom in Resene ‘Akaroa’ and Resene ‘Oilskin’, and the living areas adjoining the macrocarpa kitchen in Resene ‘Mangrove’.

Helen loves the warmth and vitality that the colour has imbued throughout the huge house and she’s now busy planning her paint schemes for the upper floor. “People love the feeling in the house,” she says. “They are colours that work and they seem to attract good energies. The whole house has just come alive.”