Julie Tait, A&D Technical Specification Manager at Johnstone’s Trade
Wellbeing is the performance metric of the moment for the built environment. The arrival of new green building certifications with a specific focus on long-term health and wellbeing has cemented its place alongside embodied carbon and energy performance as a marker of the most sustainable spaces.
Frameworks such as BREEAM and the WELL Building Standard now take a broader view of wellbeing, looking at daylight and electric lighting quality, acoustic comfort, glare and visual balance, and occupant control, so the assessment expands beyond material emissions alone. For specifiers, that means going beyond IAQ to deliver spaces that help people feel and perform better.
This means more scrutiny of the factors that influence wellbeing, and indeed all the products that influence indoor environments. Paints and coatings have long been a focus for protecting indoor air quality (IAQ), and maximum values for volatile organic compounds have been a priority for architects and manufacturers alike when ensuring that products don’t have a negative impact on users’ health and wellbeing.
In this context, colour and finish choices are more than aesthetic: they affect how light is perceived, how glare is managed and how easily people can navigate a space, areas explicitly recognised by BREEAM and WELL, making them part of a measurable route to better wellbeing rather than a “nice-to-have”.
But as the industry’s approach to how people feel in the spaces evolves, it’s worth a closer look at what materials and coatings can deliver beyond IAQ. For architects and specifiers working on office and education spaces in particular, there is power in the right paint choice to create environments where users can feel and perform at their best, as well as look after their health.
Making sense of sensory thresholds
Awareness of how interiors affect how people work and learn has grown significantly in recent years. The widespread transition to home working and learning gave employees and students a taste of what it was like to design their own workplaces, and with it an understanding of the environment that works for them. As a result, occupants are now looking for a wider variety of work and education spaces that suit them better.
Paint and coatings play a huge part in colour strategies that provide this variety, but these need to be led by a knowledge of how different tones and textures can establish different sensory experiences. Work and education don’t retain the same tempo throughout – some tasks require lively collaboration, others quiet concentration. The right colour strategy will mark out areas for these different types of work, with designs to match.
The theory sets out three different sensory thresholds, low, medium, and high, and the colour strategy needs to flex for each one:
High sensory threshold spaces benefit from bold, vibrant, and saturated colours, with more complex patterns and textures. Think bright yellows, warm oranges, and saturated blues, teals, and greens.
Medium sensory threshold spaces are best designed with soft, muted, or pastel tones as a base, with careful addition of brighter colours as accents to add areas of energy and avoid sensory stagnation.
Low sensory threshold spaces are designed for individuals who experience hypersensitivity and can become easily overstimulated by visual, auditory, or tactile input. Neutral and muted, pastel shades should lead here, including soft blues, gentle greens and pale pinks for example.
Designing with sensory thresholds in mind aligns closely with modern certification standards: calmer zones with balanced lighting support focus and recovery; higher‑energy zones benefit from stronger contrasts and controlled brightness. These are the kinds of human‑centred variables BREEAM and WELL encourage teams to address alongside emissions.
Variability should always be the foundation of these strategies – it will be particularly important for neurodiverse learners and workers, who have a deep understanding of how they work best and need to know there are areas designed specifically for them.
Supporting accessibility
Designing for whole building wellbeing means prioritising accessibility that goes beyond what’s required in the Building Regulations. Commercial and public interiors should strive for accessibility that makes everyone feel included, and colour strategies have serious power here, too. Supporting with wayfinding is a key example – public spaces such as schools and hospitals often use colour to distinguish between departments and clearly show people how to navigate the building quickly and effectively, without needing to read signs.
A carefully designed colour strategy also makes for a safer experience for people who are visually impaired. Colour should be used to differentiate between critical adjacent surfaces, such as door and frames, skirting boards, and stairs and ramps. There are specific rules about this in Approved Document M of the Building Regulations, which requires a light reflectance value (LRV) of at least 30 points between critical surfaces. This doesn’t mean throwing the whole design out of the window, however, and specifiers should work with manufacturers to find coatings and materials that meet the regulations and maintain the aesthetic vision. Accessible spaces still need to look the part.
Wellbeing that works
Sustainability certifications have firmly made their way from the cutting edge to the mainstream, and it means the highest-profile commercial, public, and residential projects are having to evolve in order to differentiate themselves. This is part of the reason for a more committed, more holistic approach to building health and wellbeing, but it’s also thanks to a better understanding of what makes these spaces work for people.
This approach has meant thinking beyond IAQ in the context of paint and coatings and leveraging the power of colour strategies to create spaces with different sensory thresholds, and that support real accessibility. Manufacturers are engaged with the drive towards a built environment that supports wellbeing, so architects and designers should build them into specifying decisions to take advantage of their expertise.
For more information and specific guidance from Johnstone’s Trade, download your copy of the Indoor Air Quality Guide.