Kitchen: Colour me beautiful....

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Anyway, pressing on with the kitchen. Once I'd done my taking stock (not at all the same as a stock-take!) of the room, the next stage was colour choice. My favourite, bestest, most enjoyable bit in the whole world ever! I could look at paint colours all day every day. Mmmmmmm. Mr Modern Country is completely confounded by this pastime. If I've heard 'Oh, you're looking at colour charts.... again' once, I've heard it a thousand times!

So how do I choose a colour for a room? Well, my first step is always to look through as many colour charts as possible, waiting for particular shades to jump out at me. Not because they're garish but just because I love them. The kitchen is a North-West facing room that doesn't get masses of light, especially in the winter so the colour can't be too cool.

When I've narrowed the choice down slightly....

I buy sample pots........

and paint them onto A3 bits of paper.

I then hold these up in different places in the room and at different times of day and night to get a feel for how they react to different moods. Those photos are of almost all of my sample pots, by the way, not just the ones I've bought for the kitchen. There are a lot, I know, but I find that if you rely on the paint chips on the charts then, especially with the more expensive brands, you can't get a good understanding of how the paint will look on a larger scale.

By this time, I've usually narrowed it down to two or three. I've taken some shots of different pieces of paper held up against one of the kitchen cupboards. It looks bizarrely like I've actually painted the room in each of the colours in the photos but, rest assured, I didn't take my crazy colour obsession that far! So, here goes....

Farrow and Ball Ball Green:

Farrow and Ball Blue Grey:

Paint and Paper Company Eucalyptus:

My vote's with the Blue Grey. Which do you like? Watch this space!

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Paint chart crazy

I'm mad about colour. One of my favourite things in the world to do is sit on my own and look at paint colour charts and sample pots, of which I have quite a collection. Even as I write this, I know this is not a normal thing to do! I find it so restful and restorative looking at colours that I like, which I why I spend aaaaaggges choosing colours for each room. It means that every time I go into a room, where I have got the colour choice just exactly right, I glow inside. That's the best way of describing how I feel. As I said, I am crazy about colour!

Here are my paint charts.....

There are lots of colours that I like but quite a narrow band of colour that I love. My favourite colour is 'Is it grey? Is it blue? Is it green?' That's the best name for it!

There are some hues, which are called cusp colours. Apparently, our brains store colours under definite groupings. These shades are on the cusp of two (or three...) different groups. You can't, therefore, store them as an exact memory and have to keep looking at them to know what colour they are precisely. That's the theory but I find it true in practice too. That's exactly why I like them so much. Each time I catch a glimpse of the colour, I feel as though I am capturing it again for the first time. Lovely.

Here are my sample books:

I adore colours that need gazing into to see them fully. I find not all paint ranges do this. They just don't have the right intensity of pigment. That's nothing to do with brightness of colour but of the quality of the paint. I am a Farrow and Ball girl through and through, with the occasional foray into Earthborn, Paint and Paper Library or Fired Earth.

When I look at the paint charts or the samplebooks (which have substantially larger blocks of each colour), I find some colours seem to jump out at me. These are usually the colours that I then order sample pots for, which I paint on large pieces of A3 stiff paper.

This is the best way to see if you truly like a colour. Good quality colours seem to change beyond belief from room to room and, even, from wall to wall. An excellent way to understand how the colour will build up intensity in a room is to hold the paper up to a corner and bend it so that half is on one wall and the other half on the adjacent wall. That way, it gets a chance to reflect back on itself, as it would if it were all over the walls, like so:

When this has narrowed down my choice, I then give the final test. I paint a large section of one of the walls to be decorated. And then....... I deliberate and contemplate and hesitate and consider and ponder and cogitate and ruminate and study and mull over and over and over....and then, hopefully, decide!!

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