So how colourful is your house?

Two-tone apartment block with a wrecked truck as an unexpected sculpture out the front

A common colour combination

Paint is one of the cheapest and quickest ways to transform your home—inside and out.

Some people love big bold colours in their rooms, while others (Poor John is an example) prefer muted colours. Off-white is his favourite, but I don’t let him choose all the colours in our house.

Exterior paint jobs run the gamut too, but nothing quite prepared me for the use of colour in and on Indian homes.

Because we’re travelling around India by road—we’ve already covered 10,000 kilometres on this trip—I’ve had plenty of opportunity to whizz by houses of every colour imaginable.

Once I got over the shock of seeing so many eye-smiting electric green houses with orange and brown verandahs and trim, I started photographing some of the most startling combinations, as well as the most, in my opinion, subdued, which you see just below.

Sometimes a homeowner builds a small shop as part of the house, so you may notice counters and goods. These are still predominantly houses and not businesses.

Virtually all of these photographs have been taken from a moving vehicle, so the angle, focus and amount of house shown vary, but they’re enough to show you just how the imagination takes flight. There are some fabulous ones that aren’t included here simply because I wasn’t quick enough with the camera. Such a pity.

At least interiors stand still and they can be equally creative.

Gary in the pink

Deepti and Anand in blue

Just above are pictures of Deepti and Anand dining in front of electric blue, and Gary trying to relax in an electric pink hotel room in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan. Gary just happens to be a house painter and while he gets a kick out of the array of colours in use in India, he is appalled by the way paint is slopped around.

We know what he’s talking about when we hear him mutter,
Haven’t these people heard of drop cloths?
Doesn’t anyone know how to tape trim?

But Gary’s pink room is no exception. Pink and mauve seem to rule as house colours in India, along with shades of green (and almost never grey).

One of my favourite combinations. Note the blue driveway gate

Another favourite

The exterior of our small hotel in Kalimpong in West Bengal is pink (no photo because the street is too narrow). Inside and out, the quality of work is fairly good; however, colour choice on the inside is another matter.

In just our room, the walls are chartreuse, the carpet is red (and has been pieced together so there isn’t any carpet under the bed), the trim is brown, the doors are white, the curtains are blue and white floral, the bedding has brown and amber circles, the bathroom has five kinds of tiles with five different colours and patterns, and the ceiling is timber. I’d take a picture but I can’t step back far enough to capture the full impact.

So I’m wondering. Do any of you out there have anything that can compete with these gems. I’d love to see them.

P.S. Interested in more colourful house photos? Let me know and I’ll keep taking and posting them.

P.S.S. If you saw the last post about our daughter getting married, I thought you’d like to know they have arrived in Paris. They’ve shared a sunrise picture from their temporary apartment. Needs a bit of colour!