Is your caravan too stylish?

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Colour choices are highly subjective, which means that with a few exceptions there’s no right or wrong way to select a scheme for your caravan.

Some caravan manufacturers have professional colour consultants available to help you when you make your final selection, but with some common sense you can make your own decisions.

I’m a writer, but my wife is a former interior decorator, so I leave all the colour choices to her and they are invariably good ones.

Most manufacturers use white, silver or light grey cladding for the exterior of their vans for a good reason – lighter colours are cooler. It’s easy to put this to the test. Visit any caravan yard when the sun is shining and place your palm on a white surface in the sun; then try the same test on darker coloured panels, or black checker plate.

It might be uplifting to choose a bright exterior colour for your van, particularly when a rainbow of shades is now available in aluminium cladding. You can match your tow car’s colour with your cladding or bold caravan graphics, but the person you ultimately sell your van to may not have the same make or colour tow car or share your taste.

It’s safer (and cooler) to choose something in a lighter and more neutral toning.

Case in point. We painted some feature walls in our house in a bright yellow, but the people we sold it to repainted the walls white after they moved in. Then, the people whose house we bought pro-actively painted its yellow feature walls white to sell it, but we immediately re-painted them back to yellow once we moved in. Everyone has a personal choice.

It can also be tempting to let your colour palette run wild when choosing your coloured splashbacks, glossy two-pack drawer and cabinet finishes and even photo feature bedhead walls make this easy.

But while repainting a wall in your home is no big deal or cost, changing your caravan’s décor can be much harder and costly.

Try to avoid temptation by focussing on hues that make your van feel spacious and that won’t date too quickly.

Less obvious is that you also need to consider how the colours you use in your van will make you feel. Colour is more than a visual experience; it's also a psychological one that can affect mood and emotion. Hot reds evoke passion; blues are passive; black is depressive, etc.

Some popular colour schemes that buyers are choosing these days include soft blues, greys and white. Other pastel colours and even a dash of colour can be used for the splashback, as this  can easily and relatively inexpensively be changed to suit a future owner.

You can also incorporate beige, cream or your preferred neutral or earthy hues to complement timber-look flooring and visually expand your space. Remember that the darker you go, the smaller your van will seem.

Starting with a neutral pallet will enable you to upgrade your linens and soft furnishings regularly. Accessories such as brightly coloured cushions and bed throws can take your van from drab to fab in a few minutes, and they’re an easy and inexpensive way to create an on-trend interior. Try shopping at Big W.

Try not to introduce too many patterns or colours though, as doing so will make an already-limited space look cluttered and therefore harder to add patterns in bedding, throws, cushions etc. later.

For the flooring, choose a colour that won’t show too much dirt and is easy to clean, as we all know that keeping the van floor clean is almost impossible at the best of times.

A current decorator trend you might want to consider is to have tapware, sinks and other fixtures in black, with timber-look benches and earthy-themed linens and accessories.

But fashions change from year to year, so don’t get caught with an expensive ‘black look’ the year that everyone goes back to cream or white again! Home fashion magazines often preview new seasons’ colours and are therefore good reference material, as European summer fashions usually re-surface in Australia six months later!

Indoor plants are everywhere right now, and you’ll usually find fake ones purchased at popular homeware stores popular in display caravans, as they need no maintenance.

They can also be a perfect addition to any caravan if they can be kept secure while on the road. Succulents are perfect to take with you as they are relatively maintenance-free and having your favourite herbs while you’re on your adventure will make your culinary efforts seem just that little bit tastier.

But you don’t need to be a total slave to fashion, or to the unknown whims of your caravan’s future owners. Remember, you are planning to make your own memories on your travels and the most important thing is to find a colour palette that feels right to you.