Being a confident colourist

Our relationship with colour is a very personal thing. Love it or loathe it, it can say a great deal about our own personalities and how we feel about ourselves and our surroundings. I read recently that our great love affair with grey is coming to an end, apparently this can be gauged by national paint sales. I have to say I am relieved. There is nothing less inspiring than a grey interior, on a grey, overcast day in the British Isles. That said, I did experience my own grey-ish period for a while. For a short time, I absolutely celebrated the neutrals pages of Farrow & Ball’s paint card. Evocatively named shades like French Gray, which is actually more green than grey, Charlston Gray, after the rural Bloomsbury retreat, Pigeon, and Moles Breath adorned the walls of my farmhouse. From the Bulmer range came Flaxen Grey, Lead Colour, Wash Stop and Slate. The Paint Library went so far as to provide helpful sub-sections for warm or cool greys, coming up with commanding names like Opus and Monument, appropriate for impressive, classical interiors. But the reason I fell for these endlessly neutral shades was the way they behaved with objects placed in front of them. Any object, be it a painting or a stack of books, or a vase of flowers or a delft plate, would begin to sing with colour and with texture. This family of off greys were the perfect foil for my possessions, showing them off to their best advantage. What they would have done without any possessions to show off however, is anyone’s guess.

These days, I have for the most part, thrown off my grey mantle and instead I have embraced colour with all its wondrously clashing appeal. 

Colour has the ability to alter our mood, express emotion and command impression. Warm colours lure us back to the safety of the womb, cool colours take us to the ocean or deep into the forest and vivid colours act like jewels when treated with precision.

Wearing colour draws attention. In the same way, an interior that shouts about its architectural proportion or historic character through colour, draws attention.

In colourful interiors, possessions need to play their part. They become carefully curated items, that contribute their own colour, harmonising or contrasting with their backdrop. When recently dressing our new red sitting room, I selected emerald green glass items as the curated objects that I knew would set the red patterned wallpaper on fire.  But in a predominantly white, modern cottage interior, I chose a multitude of tonal blues.

Balancing colour is also an important element when designing interior schemes. Bold colours in equal measure can appear confused, but adding modest accents of contrasting colour can, like in the case of the green with red, bring a room to life.

Texture is also important to colour. The current fashion for colour drenching, an idea initially invented by the Georgians, relies on texture to give a richness to a single colour interior that would otherwise be flat and uninteresting. If considering a colour drenched scheme, pick out extreme contrasts of texture throughout the room. For instance, teaming velvet and brocade soft furnishings with matt chalk painted walls and shiny silk-finished woodwork would create an intriguing sensory rich interior that copes well with single colour application. If too many textures of a similar type are used, the effect would fall flat.

Colour should also be used wisely. Do not paint your bedroom bright purple if you want a quiet, calm space to rest. Do not decorate your north-facing rooms in blue, as they will rarely feel warm. If you paint your ceiling a dark shade of any colour, expect the space to reduce in height.

I am not a fan of accent walls, and by that, I mean a single wall picked out in a stronger colour to the rest of the room. The effect is disharmonious in my opinion. Treating walls differently in terms of colour or shade impacts on how they recede away from or advance into the room. So unless you have a long thin room that you need to make squarer, avoid messing around with architectural dimensions through colour accent walls.

As a final thought, I would say relax with colour. It is not a thing to be afraid of. A wall can of course be repainted if you really don’t like it. I would also encourage experimentation with colour, show it who’s boss. Play with tonal pallets and then lob in an incendiary contrast colour, that brings the harmony to life and use texture as your friend. These simple principals will guide even the most timorous decorator. And, when its all become Childs play? you can throw the rule book away!