Australian Design Review speaks to Miss Lolo founder Tamzyn Adding about her steadfast belief in the benefits of colourful interiors.

Tamzyn Adding is in a rental at the moment, meaning she is held back from splashing colour around the home, which is deeply at odds with her nature. The New Zealand expat is living in Australia after relocating here at the start of 2023 when her bold and bright wall coverings business – Miss Lolo – found a new market across the ditch. 

Coming from an art, graphic design and fashion background, Adding started Miss Lolo “by mistake” while working as a full-time celebrity stylist in 2013. 

She had found herself tired of a world of interiors “plagued by an epidemic of beige”, according to the origin story on the Miss Lolo website. What began as a furniture refurbishment business organically grew into quarterly collections of wallpapers and pieces for the home, which are best described using the brand’s tagline: “Like a drag queen in a nunnery, Miss Lolo smashes through ubiquitous muted trends of modern interior furnishings in a blaze of bold, eclectic, unapologetic colour.”

Embracing colour in the home

Despite the spotlight on maximalist and eclectic interiors in recent years, Adding believes a “white-on-white-on-beige” aesthetic continues to dominate residential design. 

“I think there’s still a big fear factor around colour, so we try to break down those stigmas and try to get across to people [that] there’s no need to follow trends; you need to follow what makes you happy,” she tells Australian Design Review. 

“Your house needs to be a reflection of yourself [and] the colours you love.”

Born into a family of artists, Adding looks to the art community for inspiration, alongside a good dose of gut feeling to drive the directions of new Miss Lolo collections. She particularly enjoys the work of Australians Rachel Burke and Kasey Rainbow for their unrestrained approach to chromatics.

Adding admits she isn’t one to follow interior design trends, however. And, even for a big colour fan, she has no idea what the Pantone Colour of the Year is. 

“Why is [Peach Fuzz] the colour of the year? Says who? Someone at Pantone? Great,” she says. 

“What about what the homeowner wants? What makes the homeowner feel good? I don’t know anybody who goes: ‘I feel amazing in a white room’.” 

The psychology of colour

As many interior designers have learned, and as research and Eastern concepts like Vastu Shastra and Feng Shui have shown, colour choices in a space have important impacts on the mental health of its users.

Some studies have found humans aren’t hardwired to always respond to certain colours in certain ways, regardless of other compounding factors. Whites, beiges and neutrals also have their place across these different schools of thought around the psychology of colour, but Adding sees no logic behind the traditionally all-white approach to places like hospitals or mental health facilities. 

“There is logic behind why they bring colour into the children’s wards – to bring energy and hope – well let’s bring it into everybody’s homes,” she says.

When it comes to creating a work-from-home space that makes you feel good, colour and texture play an important role. As Zenith brand director Matt Vescovo noted in a recent ADR piece: “It’s important to be surrounded by tactile, vibrant things”.

Getting the balance right

There is still a balance to be struck, even when it comes to the application of Miss Lolo designs.

“When they come to our website, people assume that my house is this crazy overflow of maximalist colour and that’s not what we have at all,” Adding says.  

To avoid a sense of overwhelm, Adding has created pops of colour with feature walls inside her own homes over the years, which don’t compete with her art collection.

“Like art, we expect our wallpaper to be treated in the same way,” she says.

Miss Lolo also creates peel-and-stick options that allow for non-committal designs inside commercial spaces and rentals, or just allow for people’s tastes to evolve over time.

“I want people to walk into their homes, and yes there is an element of calm, but I think there has to be an element of inspiration. I want people to say ‘yes, this feels authentically like me’.”