Paint

[smokingboot]

Hmm. Farrow and Ball; a triumph of marketing over sense.

It's hard to know what to make of a paint company that gives its products descriptive titles names like 'drab' and 'dead salmon.' The idea, I presume,is to convey a sense of understated English elegance redolent of card rooms and dinner parties. It's good quality stuff for sure; but I begin to suspect there's a world of BS in interior decoration.

This house is pleasant with a large hallway, stairwell and landing; trouble is that there's little light. I need to know what kind of fixtures spread light around in a dark space. The last owners had strange ideas about what lighting best suits a hallway they painted sort of pinky lavender grey:





These lampshades had one thing going for them: they must have been cheap as chips, and therefore easy to repeat up the stair and on the upper landing. But quite how they thought a combination of mustard and lavender in a dark space would benefit anyone beats me. One tester I bought from Farrow & Ball was called 'Snow White.' It's as dull as ditchwater anywhere in the house except the main corridor, where painted on top of the aforementioned lavender grey it gains a very slight green tint. The effect is really peculiar. In some lights it looks dull, in others, positively ectoplasmic.

The kitchen is dark too and I've no idea what to do about it. Better wattage for the recessed lighting, I guess, and get rid of the low hanging roman blinds. And one solution keeps hoving into view for both spaces...

Yellow.

At least it's not wallpaper.

In truth, I am almost ready to discard yellow for the kitchen, thinking instead of a hard-wearing white that doesn't resonate of haunted house. The kitchen already has black and grey mosaic tiles, so the monochrome thing might work well, and everything else will have to be down to lighting and blinds; white blinds are easy enough, apart from being a bit boring and failing to keep the warmth in. Truth is, I don't like white. But even a gentle terracotta darkens the room too much.

Back to yellow. Radical controversial terrifying yellow. The lights don't get seen, the brights make one scream.

Still, considering going for something like Benjamin Moore Hawthorne Yellow, Farrow and Ball Dayroom Yellow, or just some cheap and cheerful daffodil colour from Dulux. Once the colours make sense I can try to work out the lighting fixtures. But it really does feel like it could take the rest of my life.

Maybe time to magnolia the whole thing...

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

What I found when I was painting my house (back in the days when I owned one) was that a white with just the barest whisper of violet was the best color for lightening windowless spaces.

Of course, you may find differently. 😀

[smokingboot]

I have never heard of that solution! It sounds simple and elegant. I will look for testers.