I have found picking wall colours very hard. Being a designer I'm used to thinking about colour - but the scale seems to make all the difference. I'm also not used to thinking about how light will affect my colour choices.
As I observed in my first post, in the kinds of rooms I'm looking to for inspiration, the walls are in pale neutral colours which create a blank canvas for the colourful furnishings and objects within.
I'm following that guide closely in my bedroom but dead white is too harsh and clinical. In the bedroom I have trusted to Farrow and Ball and taken their tip to use their Wimbourne White for an east facing room - a white with a bare touch of yellow in it which will help warm the space in the afternoons when the sunlight is indirect...
... OK I'll admit the paintjob doesn't exactly photograph as stunningly transformative, but it really has done what F&B promised and made the room feel immeditely more like a home.
However the other room poses a tricker problem, with paint choices needed to do more. I want to create warmth and cosiness without losing a sense of space. But in this room I also want to use wall colour to help zone, since the room incorrporates the kitchen and living space.
I also think that if my bedroom inspiration is fairly clean and knocked back, I'd like a little more richness in the main room.
My first thought was of gold. I've long had a dream of gold walls.
I tried out a couple of shades from Crown's Crafted selection and they weren't quite what I imagined - one much more pale and colourless than the yellow gold I had in mind, the other quite coppery, and both with less metallic sheen than I had in mind. I'm very aware that in any other than strong direct line gold becomes essentially a bown or a beige.
There is a way to acheive a really shiny yellow gold finish like in the picture to the far right in the collection about of kitcheny images, which is to foil it using faux gold sheets.
But in fact I've become quite taken by the look of the Crown paints. Proper gold is somewhat de trop outside of, say, a chateau.
Either way it's clear gold is too much for a whole wall, so I've decided to put the paler gold paint - called Striking Gold - on the relatively deep window surrounds in the room, where the sheen catches the morning light, I think, very nicely.
And this is the colour I've put on the wall that faces the kitchen area - Egyptian Cotton from Crown:
I know - another less than stunning colour in photograph. It's drying in this photo and so patchy here, and looks like bare plaster. Part of my aim in blogging is to hopefully have a record of awkward in-process photos to have to compare the eventual, hopefully lovely, results that emerge later. This is a wall I have my first big plans for and I'm feeling confident that this will be a really smart backdrop for those - i.e. my bookshelves.
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