Editor’s Letter

What’s Your Color?
colors we choose for our homes
With 90-year-old mosaic statue “Christ the Redeemer” in Rio de Janeiro, my mother’s homeland.

Everyone has a color. There are over 10 million colors and they contain radiant energy that “powerfully influences mental, emotional and spiritual states,” color specialist Martha Langer wrote in Purist about Color Vibrance, a practice created to bring harmony, inner power and energy to daily life by replicating our natural unique pigments of eyes, hair, skin—our sacred signature essence—through the clothes we wear to the colors we choose for our homes.

At one point my color was gray. Perhaps it started in high school when William Butler Yeats showed me that age is not a number; it’s a color:

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…”

At college, I discovered I could chart my life in periods of color, like a painter, starting with pink, then mellow yellow, then green, navy blue, black and white. In my studio art class that yielded a terrible rendition of Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” I discovered gray is the sum total of all the colors combined. It whispers, “I’m not trying too hard,” unlike the preferred basic black uniform this New Yorker had adopted over the past several decades.

But it was Langer’s color consult that sent me toward my color—rust, from the most potent color family, red, which is the color of celebratory occasions, emotional persuasion and passion; and earthy brown, which is a grounding, stabilizing color. While this reflects my signature pigments, I realized the peripheral environments I grew up visiting regularly—the red clay soil of Portugal, golden Brazil, the light brown plains of Wyoming, the burnt orange sunsets in Southampton—keep drawing me back because I feel most harmonious in those places.

In this Mindful Architecture and Design issue, we ventured to find a kaleidoscope of lives, beginning with the organically grown Miranda Kerr on our cover. Her eponymous home collection is rendered in soft pinks and creams—colors which, generally speaking, reflect her kind, nurturing, compassionate, calming, elegant and pure presence.

Figure out what color you need more of in your home to create harmony and vibratory light in your daily life—and tap into your soul’s blueprint.