Colour preference is a topic which has attracted the ‘attention’ of nearly every researcher or writer on colour and light psychology from Cohn’s first empirical study in 1894 to the latest reports on the subject in colour conferences and books. Nicholas Humphrey, in the early 1970s, suggested that rhesus monkeys found blue light more pleasant than red light. Rikard Kuller suggests that the key factor for increased pleasantness in the built environment may lie in the balance between complexity and unity. In a restoration experiment, where two-storey buildings of concrete and wood were repainted in dark red with a black cornice, and the doors a strong green and red, when the scheme was evaluated in situ, there was an increase in both pleasantness evaluation as well as perceived complexity. Colour preference studies, both experimental as well as contextual, will no doubt continue to interest researchers in the field of colour psychology and experimental aesthetics.