Colour
Pink wall art, without the room looking like a nursery.
Pink has a reputation problem that comes almost entirely from one narrow part of the range. Move a few steps along it and it becomes one of the most usable colours there is.
The shades on this page, with their hex values — useful if you are matching paint or searching elsewhere.
The part of the range to avoid
Bright, cool, high-saturation pink is the one that reads as a children's room, and it is what most people picture when they hear the word. Nearly everything else in the family behaves differently.
The pinks that work in a living room
- Dusty rose — greyed-off and muted. Behaves close to a neutral and sits with almost anything.
- Clay pink — pink with brown in it, on the boundary with terracotta. Warm and earthy rather than sweet.
- Mauve — pink pulled towards purple. Cooler, and good with grey where the warmer pinks are not.
- Plum — deep enough to act as a dark anchor, like burgundy.
What pink sits with
The pairing that does the most work is pink with something distinctly unsweet: charcoal, black frames, dark timber, or a deep green. Pink with cream and pale timber is pretty and can tip into sugary; pink with a hard dark element does not.
Brass yes, chrome no — chrome cools the pink and makes it look synthetic.
Prints in this colour
From the Artsby collection, ranked by how close each palette sits to the shades above. Printed in Australia, delivery included.
Or match it to your actual room
Photograph the wall and the matcher reads the real colours out of it — then shows you prints in those, and lets you hang one on your own wall before you buy.