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The colourful sheep
It didn’t begin as a mission. Not really. Back then, everything was white in Sweden. Floors, walls, ceilings. And for a young interior designer trying to find her place, it was also the expectation. Today, Sara Garanty is Sweden’s most renowned expert on colour. But what does it take to swim against the current, and not be swept away by it?
“If you want to succeed, you have to specialise in something,” her boss once told her.
For Sara, the answer was instinctively: colour.
Sara has always stood out. Even as a teenager, when everyone else dressed in black, she wore purple. While others followed what felt safe, she leaned into what felt true to herself.
That instinct only deepened when she later studied three years in Barcelona. There, she discovered something that hadn’t been part of her education in Sweden. Colour as a discipline. Something you could study, analyse, and truly understand.
Back home, colour had barely been addressed, and when she first began speaking about colour professionally, she was met with resistance. No one really listened, her lectures were empty, and she was told to let it go. But Sara didn’t. Not because she was loud or particularly forceful. In fact, she describes herself as the opposite.
“I’m not a pushy person. Some people seem born to be leaders or lectures, but that’s not my character at all,” she says. “But I love colour so much that I just continued. Slowly, slowly, I have become a kind of colour expert. Because I didn’t care what other thought. Today, all my lectures are full.”
“There’s always more to learn about colours. It’s endless.””
“What if we surrounded ourselves with colours and beauty? I think that we need to consume beautiful things to thrive, lift our hearts, and be kind to each other.”
Like a Group of Friends
That love for colour is not something that has faded over time. If anything, it has only deepened.
“Colours are my friends,” Sara says. “It’s like having a group of friends that you hang out with and never get tired of.”
And just as with real friends, it’s hard to choose one favourite. To her, that question doesn’t even make sense.
“Asking for a favourite colour is like asking a musician for a favourite note. It’s not about one, but the combinations.”
After 15 years of studying colour, her curiosity is still intact. Combinations, psychology, pigments, light, or even its history. She consumes it all. She just digs deeper, layer upon layer.
“There’s always more to learn about colours. It’s endless.”
“Asking for a favourite colour is like asking a musician for a favourite note. It’s not about one, but the combinations.”
Spirituality and Staying Balanced
That way of thinking. Of colour as something more than aesthetics is something that defines Sara’s approach to her work.
“Colour is not just colour. It’s energy. It’s light. And light is frequency.”
Each colour carries a wavelength. A measurable effect. Red activates. Blue calms. Yellow stimulates. It’s not philosophy, she insists.
“It’s physics.”
And because of that, colour becomes a tool. Something you can actively use to shape how you feel, think, and live.
It’s also what connects to another part of her work. The spiritual part. Alongside her role as an interior designer and colour expert, Sara reads people’s auras. According to her, each person carries a dominant colour. A reflection of who they are, what they need, and how they move through the world. Sara’s is orange.
“Orange stands for creativity, ideas, and energy. And if you have a lot of orange, as I do, you must balance it with the counter colour. For me, that is dark blue. It grounds me and calms my mind, so I can stay balanced. That’s why I always wear something blue.”
Dancing Through it All
By now, you probably think everything in Sara’s life is about colours. It’s almost, but not entirely.
Dancing is Sara’s greatest passion. She’s danced her entire life, even professionally when she was younger. But while not pursuing it as job, dancing has been acting as a constant companion. Moving to music is when she feels the most alive, most fully herself. It inspires her and gives her a language beyond words.
From Brazilian forró to Iranian underground dance, she travels across the world through dance, and it inspires her work.
“My biggest interest in life is dancing. To see beauty and high-quality art of any form brings me so much inspiration and energy.”
An Ode to Inspiration
When asked why colour matters in a world preoccupied with geopolitics and uncertainty, Sara returns to something more immediate.
“When I wear my colourful coat around town, everyone looks at me. My first though is, do I have something on my face? But people always come up to me and compliment me for the colours. No one says they got depressed from meeting me.”
To her, this reflects something larger. Because despite living in a time of abundance, many people are not thriving. In Sweden, she notes, a large part of the population relies on antidepressants.
“Why are we struggling? We should be thriving, being our best selves. But instead, we have anxiety, we feel lost, we feel depressed.”
So, the question, for her, becomes not whether colour matters, but what we are missing without it.
“What if we surrounded ourselves with colours and beauty? I think that we need to consume beautiful things to thrive, lift our hearts, and be kind to each other.”
To Sara, design is inseparable from well-being. A space that supports focus, energy, and calm changes how we move through our day, and how we show up for the people around us.
“I think my only goal is to inspire as many people as I can with colour throughout my life and help people to thrive in their environment. A lot of people have trouble sleeping, which makes them unhappy. But by simply changing their curtains or walls to a darker blue, they sleep better.”
“Colour is such an easy life hack.”
