Colour advice: best from paint colour consultant?
I often receive this sort of email asking for colour advice:
I am moving into a new house and with 2 young boys am going to use the Ultimatt for its keep clean quality.
I was hoping within this range you could recommend a warm neutral for the lounge and hall and a warm blue for the boy’s rooms. Many thanks
This is my considered response.
Thanks for contacting me
I often get this sort of request for a colour recommendation, and unfortunately it is an impossible question for me to answer fairly
1 – Without any context of other colours in the rooms, even the most neutral “safe” colour could be completely wrong.
2 – Whilst I am handy with colours and have used hundreds of different colours over the years, I am not in the same league as a bona fide colour consultant.
So whenever colour selection is involved, to maintain the same high level of advice and service expected of this site, I fast forward all colour enquiries to Ingrid at Lilou Interiors Her online services start at £45 per colour scheme, less than a gallon of paint.
Advantages of using an experienced colour consultant
I am not saying painters and decorators can’t pick colours, but just like I have to think of a lot of angles before deciding what paint to specify where and when, so with professional colour advisers. They go through a holistic process, for want of a better word, making a full assessment of a room, the customers’ tastes and THE CUSTOMERS’ expectations for the room (mod, traditional, themed etc). A fair answer isn’t just plucked from a colour card.
For instance, this is, by the homeowner’s own admission, the average banal “safe” neutral colour choice they have been living with for years.
This makeover is a result of the homeowner and colour consultant working together (online). The Fired Earth paint colours are not beige, but are soft and reflective of the homeowner’s actual preference for blue and green – perfect for a Victorian sea-side home. Also the full paint palette came with an explanation, and provided the customer with the confidence to show the chair and picture off to its best. Something that had never happened before in that particular home, lived in by that particular family.
Smart colour selection is all about getting to know the customer’s tastes and expectations, divining what is right for the customer. What isn’t best is to plonk down a cookie cutter or trendy scheme from a magazine or colour book, or ask a painter like me who will say I painted this colour before, they seemed to like it.
Redecorating costs time and money, so why not maximise the value for money with the best possible visual effect.
Colour consultants eradicate the wrong colours
Homeowners who ask for colour advice don’t tend to know where to start, and are very confused by the myriad possibilities even of a wall colour. Colour experts on the other hand work with colour day in day out, making sense of an almost infinite range of options.
The best colour consultants can work in any medium and don’t live and die by a colour wheel. Weavers have a highly tuned eye for mixing and matching yarn, and it is a doddle coming up with a wall colour for an interior design scheme. Likewise, I suspect a stained glass window maker could run up a paint scheme for a kitchen without breaking into a sweat, such is their incredible command of colour and its interactions in different light and media.
How to find the right colours
I get to sit behind the scenes, and I find it quite amazing to see how Ingrid produces schemes from photos and a couple of emails.
- Initially she focuses on finding the colours the clients don’t like (which funnily enough seem to be the colours they have painted with for years!)
- She finds out the age of the property; the intended use of the space; age of occupants, especially children if it’s a scheme for their bedroom; likes and dislikes; what they are hoping to achieve with the final look…
- She then thinks about everything for a while, then drills down to finally produce a colour pallet for ceiling, walls and woodwork.
- Ingrid has proscribed the colour of every element in a room before, down to the colour of sofa throws, but more often than not, she explains how the paint colours work together, and those insights seem to give her clients the confidence to continue under their own steam, to accessorize their rooms, to their taste.
And the feedback is testament to that skill.
Conclusion
Just little insights like that make you realise how careful you have to be with colour; how much information is needed to produce a cohesive colour scheme; and how a push in the right direction from a colour expert can be so liberating.
It also explains why so many DIY decorated rooms just don’t work, or are underwhelming. Friends, decorators and family are probably not the best people to ask for help, unless they are really switched on with colour, consider all the angles, and can give suggestions that suit you, not them!
So ends my long-winded response to the original question, and why consulting with colour consultants is a far better option than asking me to pluck a colour blind from a swatch!
Ingrid offers an online paint colour advisory service, and for less than the cost of a gallon of Ultimatt, she works via emails and photos to give you her recommendation for the right colours for a room. A good option to really make a space pop, and maximise the effort and expense of redecorating.
Hope that helps
All the best for 2012
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