apartment progress: a paint consultation.

Farrow & Ball supplied the paint and a complimentary Colour Consultation with one of their Colour Consultants for this post. All opinions are my own.

When we moved into this apartment in September, every room save the kitchen and bathroom was painted in the same classic rental color—somewhere between white and yellow and not-quite-cream. It’s the kind of color that you can kind of fudge into looking semi-okay for a photograph but that feels pretty blah to actually live with. I knew I could brighten everything up with a coat of fresh white paint and be done with it, but I also felt like this was a chance to experiment with bringing in some color and playing with light.

The problem is, adding colors to my walls unnerves me. In most things home-related, I’d say I’m fairly confident, but paint colors feel so unpredictable. What if I choose a green and it ends up being too yellow? What if a blue reads purple? What if the mustard turns chartreuse by day and goes brown by night? In the grand scheme of things, people might say “it’s just paint,” and “you can always change it” and they’d be correct, but it’s also true that painting is an investment of real time and money. If I was going to be painting this place myself in between work and child wrangling and generally running around like a chicken with my head cut-off, I wanted to get it right the first time.

I decided to call in the experts. Beloved British paint company, Farrow & Ball, has taken their Colour Consultancy virtual since the start of the pandemic and so I reached out to see if they might be willing to let me take the service for a test drive. To my delight, they agreed! Here’s how it went:

Before my consultation, at my appointed Colour Consultant’s request, I put together pinboards for each room. This was the easy part. I filled virtual boards with images of my own home, snapshots spotted around the internet and favorite paintings from museum collections, that together represented the palette of colors that I like the best: soft greens and golds and the colors of the sea. Among the inspiration is Fairfield Porter’s Calm Morning and Maggie Pate’s indigo-dyed hands. Forever a fan of Lois Dodd’s window paintings, I added her View Through Elliot’s Shack Looking South and Blue Sky Morning. I included an image I found of a pale pink shirt on a concrete floor, and others with greenery and bits of warm wood against shadowy walls.

On the morning of my consultation, a Farrow & Ball Color Fan arrived to my door and at the scheduled time, my Colour Consultant, Jet Patterson, gave me a call. We met via video chat and together we toured the apartment, me carrying my laptop around to show her the rooms and the light and generally chatting her ear off as I showed her how the space is configured. For the purposes of this consultation, we focused on the three main rooms of our apartment: our dining/living room, our bedroom, and the kids’ room. Each of these rooms flows into the next via French doors and so I wanted to create a palette that could work across the spaces. Jet understood.

Next, at her direction, I unscrewed the color fan so I could remove individual cards from the deck and tape them to directly to the walls. The suggestions were hers—based on my pinboards, and what she saw in front of her—but the process felt collaborative. We started with a row of a dozen or more colors taped to my living room wall and narrowed things down through an immediate process of elimination. “Pull down anything you don’t like,” she suggested, and I snatched down five or six shades that I knew wouldn’t do.

Even through the computer screen, Jet’s mastery of the colors was impressive and a real comfort. (Once, when I accidentally pulled a card in the wrong shade of white, she was able to tell immediately and asked me to double-check the name.) She used my gut reactions to certain colors to make sense of what it was that I after and what might work best in our space. We returned to the color cards, we hung them up facing the light and away from it. Over the course of an hour, as we worked our way through the apartment she used words like luminous and misty to describe the paint colors. (I used words like baby formula and grubby to describe what I wanted to avoid.)

By the end of the call we’d decided on four possible paints—two whites and two colors. Jet placed an order for samples and just a few days later four tiny pots arrived to my apartment: All White for walls and trim in the dining room, Strong White for the trim in the kids’ room (to contrast with All White on the walls), Cromarty for our bedroom walls, and Pigeon for the floor of the dining room. (The pale pink on the wall above is Peignoir, which I opted against.)

Rather than painting swatches directly on the walls, Jet suggested I paint sheets of 8 x 12 watercolor paper with the samples. The sturdy sheets of paper meant I could move the colors around the apartment, paying attention to how they caught the light and changed depending on the time of day. For weeks I moved them around our space until I finally placed the order for all four of the colors. I’ve been working on the painting ever since.

No surprise, this is a work in progress. I’ve got the kids’ room to finish and the trim behind my bed to complete. There are a few spots that need touching up and the help of a painter who’s taller than I am, but the impact already is significant.

As part of the consultation Jet offered advice on paint finishes for walls, ceilings, and trim. On all the walls we decided on Farrow & Ball’s newest finish, Modern Emulsion. It’s beautiful. Not as glossy as an eggshell finish, but still completely washable and formulated specifically for busy areas (which is to say every area in a small apartment with three children). Have no doubt, the durability and washability has already been roundly tested with splattered spaghetti sauce and watercolors and frozen blueberry fingerprints.

For the trim and the floor cloth finishes, we decided on Estate Eggshell and on the ceilings, we went with a Dead Flat finish. If you live in an old house or a rental, ceilings are places that are often neglected. In our bedroom, the ceiling had multiple patches in different shades and finishes and a fresh coat of flat paint has freshened up the room considerably.

At Jet’s urging, I also took the wall color up the full height of the room. The previous wall color stopped at the picture rail and left to my own devices I would have probably followed suit. I’m so glad I listened to Jet instead. The rooms feel so much taller and more elegant this way.

As for the colors, I love them. The All White is as bright and airy as I’d hoped and a vast improvement over the not-quite-cream. The Pigeon on the dining room floor is enough of a departure from my usual choices to feel fresh and exciting but it’s subtle enough to not overwhelm the room and it pairs beautifully with the adjacent Cromarty in our bedroom. Cromarty is a color that does indeed shift throughout the day—ranging from a truly pale gray green to something much darker at night, but I’m less tempted now to call it unpredictable. To borrow Jet’s words, it’s mostly just remarkably luminous.

If you’re curious about booking Farrow & Ball’s Colour Consultancy, here are the details:

How to book: You can book a Colour Consultation online through a portal on the Farrow & Ball website. You note the date and time you’d prefer, and someone from the team at Farrow & Ball gets in touch to coordinate and confirm.

What’s included: Farrow & Ball’s virtual service includes a Farrow & Ball Colour Fan featuring the company’s 132 colors, a one-hour video consultation, four sample pots, and a digital specification sheet that can be used to place your order.

Cost: In the US, a Colour Consultancy costs $250. (Farrow & Ball is currently offering 15% off paint and paper when you complete your in-home or virtual colour consultation before February 28, 2021. The Discount is applied after completed consultation and valid until 04/04/21. Offer available in the UK, US, Canada, France and Germany only.)

Farrow & Ball supplied the paint and a complimentary Colour Consultation with one of their Colour Consultants for this post. All opinions are my own.