Colour
Terracotta wall art, and what stops it looking like a 2019 moodboard.
Terracotta went from nowhere to everywhere in about three years, which is exactly why it now needs handling with a bit of care.
The shades on this page, with their hex values — useful if you are matching paint or searching elsewhere.
Terracotta, rust and clay are not the same
- Clay is the palest — pink-brown, soft, closer to a neutral.
- Terracotta is the mid orange-red, the one everyone means.
- Rust is darker and browner, and reads as considerably more serious.
- Brick is red rather than orange and sits closer to burgundy than to terracotta.
Getting the wrong one is the most common mistake. A room with clay cushions and a rust print looks like two attempts at the same idea.
What it needs beside it
Terracotta is warm and fairly saturated, so it wants something cool or something quiet to hold it down. Sage green, bone, off-white and unpainted timber all do the job. Cool grey does not — grey pulls the orange forward and makes it look louder than intended.
The other reliable pairing is more of the same family at different depths: clay, terracotta and rust together read as a considered palette rather than a single colour repeated.
How to keep it current
The look that dated was terracotta plus arches plus a beige everything. What has not dated is terracotta as an accent against a genuinely neutral room. If you have one terracotta piece and nothing else in that colour, it looks intentional. If you have six, it looks like a phase.
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.