Hospitals

This is where selecting the right paint can play a key role. It’s important to choose a product with the right properties – whether that’s scrubbable paint for high-traffic areas, or anti-bacterial coatings for canteens and surgeries, or fire-retardant paints like Timonox for corridors and stairwells.

Creating an inviting and relaxing hospital environment

Then there’s the look and feel of a hospital. It needs to be reassuring and welcoming, so it pays to select the right colour palette, with some expert support from Crown Paints. Our colour team can help you choose the ideal shades to create the right atmosphere within a hospital and aid you with elements such as wayfinding.

Use colour to put people at ease

It is common for people visiting hospitals to be in a highly emotional state, whether they’re the patient or visiting friends and family. With this mind, the environment has to be welcoming, efficient and reassuring.

In the design of healthcare facilities, medical professionals and architects are taking a more holistic approach. Fresh air, natural light, references to nature and peaceful surroundings have all been found to be beneficial to patient and staff wellbeing. Even reducing recovery time in some cases. Which is why a children’s hospital or ward should be bright, friendly and colourful to make the visiting experience as comfortable as possible.

Hospitals vary in size. Some are vast and comprise of a number of buildings, whilst others may be specialised and smaller in scale. As such, each facility should be assessed on an individual basis. Factors such as when it was built, scale, layout, function, visitor numbers and existing furnishings should all be taken into consideration when making colour selections.

Ideally, a palette of colours should be created for use around the entire hospital as it helps to encourage fluidity throughout the building. The hospital’s main walls can all be painted the same neutral shade with attention grabbing colours used in certain key areas along with clear sign posting to aid a person’s journey through the hospital.

It’s known that people rely on colours to aid them more than signage. As a result, Many hospitals already use colour for wayfinding, breaking the hospital down into a few key zoned areas. These zoned areas might well house different functions but the colours keep the spaces memorable.