Hello lovely,
There's a particular kind of disappointment that arrives in the second week of September. You walk into a room you were perfectly happy with in July, and something has gone out of it. It looks flatter. A bit dirtier. Heavier than you remember.
Nothing in the room has changed. You haven't moved anything, you haven't washed anything, the paint is exactly the colour it was eight weeks ago.
What's changed is the light falling on it, and there's a lot less of it coming.
Which brings me to this week's topic: how to work out whether it's actually your paint, before you spend a weekend and a few hundred pounds finding out it wasn't.
@thishovehome; room colour drenched in Teal 01
@victoria_covell_interiors; walls and woodwork in Teal 01. Photo: @annastathakiphoto
Before you touch a brush, count your lamps
The first question isn't about colour at all. It's what time of day are you actually in this room?
If it's a living room and you're mostly in it in the evening, then the light you see your walls under isn't daylight at all. It's whatever bulbs you own. And in the evening, most colours are going to look a bit dirty and a bit darker than they do at eleven in the morning.
So before anything else, go and assess the lighting you already have in there.
In summer you can get away with the overhead light, because the room is bright enough to carry it. I tend to never put the big light on. We use wall lights, then lamps, then floor lamps, and you want a minimum of three layers of light in a room. That's what gives you the pockets of warmth that make a room feel cosy rather than lit.
When you're buying bulbs, look for warm white around 2700–3000K. Bright white LEDs are brilliant in a bathroom or a kitchen and quietly miserable in a living room.
None of this means throwing anything out. A new bulb and a lamp in the corner will change how that wall reads, and it costs a fraction of repainting.
@number3_lcv; room colour drenched in Green 19
Then look at what else is in the room
Still not the paint. Look at everything else that's bouncing light around, or failing to.
Is the floor swallowing the light? A bigger, brighter rug will throw some of it back up into the room. Is there a wall doing nothing? A mirror in the right place will move natural light around a space that hasn't got much of it to spare.
These are common problems, not mistakes. Most rooms have at least one of them and nobody notices until the clocks start thinking about changing.
@lucyalicehome; walls and woodwork in Blue 04
Which way does your room face?
If you've done all that and you still don't like it, now we can talk about the paint.
How much natural light a room gets, and what colour that light is, is genuinely the most powerful thing to understand about a room before you choose anything. And it's decided by which way the windows point.
Any colour works in any room, by the way. It doesn't matter which direction you're facing. It's down to getting the right undertone underneath it.
And the principle underneath all of it is that I don't fight the room. South-facing rooms tend to be the lighter ones, so I keep those light and bright. North-facing rooms tend to be the darker ones, sometimes with no window at all, and those are the ones where I'll go to a mid-dark tone. Work with what a room already is, rather than trying to argue it into being something else.
What each direction is asking for
South-facing. Direct sun through most of the day, and a lot of warmth in it. Anything with a yellow or pink undertone gets amplified when that light hits it, so put a bright white with a warm undertone in a big south-facing kitchen and it will look more luminous still. If that tips over into too much, you knock it back with a grey undertone, or a bit more black pigment, or brown. Blues and greens will soften and balance it. South-facing rooms are the forgiving ones. Almost anything looks fabulous.
East-facing. The sun rises here, so you get a cool, bright, slightly green light first thing and then it's gone. This is why an east-facing bedroom can feel lovely at seven in the morning and cold by seven at night. Warm undertones fix it: pinks, yellows, warm greens. Green and pink is one of the best combinations you could ever put in an east-facing bedroom. Pretty in the morning light, and still holding warmth in the evening when there's no sun left to help.
@littleedwardian; walls in Grey 07, stairs in Black 02
@lucyalicehome; room colour drenched in White 09
North-facing. No direct sunlight at all, and a lot of grey in the light there is. These are the rooms I work on most with clients, and the words people use about them are always the same: dark, heavy, flat, dull.
There's nothing wrong with a north-facing room. It just needs warmth put back in, so whatever colour you choose wants a deep yellow, deep red, deep pink or deep brown undertone sitting underneath it.
The trick is not to try to lighten it. It's always going to be a dark room. Fighting that is how you end up with a pale colour that looks grey and disappointed for six months of the year. Accept it and make it rich instead.
I learned that one the hard way with Taupe 03. It's a colour I really love, warm, with red and brown sitting underneath it, and I put it into a north-facing room expecting all of that warmth to come through. It went purple. The grey light found the brown undertone and took the whole thing somewhere I genuinely wasn't expecting, and the room ended up flat, with none of the warmth I'd chosen it for.
Warm undertones are the right instinct. They just need enough depth behind them to survive that grey light.
@chlohannant; walls in Taupe 03
@itsnotsogrimupnorth; room colour drenched in Pink 03
Two things help enormously here. Go for a slightly higher sheen, because an eggshell is more reflective and works beautifully in a north-facing room. And consider colour drenching: ceiling, walls and woodwork all in one colour. You'd think that would make a dark room darker, and it does the opposite. You stop noticing where the ceiling meets the wall, the boundaries go, and the space opens up.
West-facing. Nothing in the morning and then that wonderful red evening light. Lean into it. Colours with a really rich yellow or red undertone get amplified when that light lands on them, and they turn into some of the cosiest, most atmospheric rooms you'll ever sit in. A yellow in a west-facing room can look wonderful. So can a burnt orange, a saffron, a cinnamon. Or if it's tipping too warm for you, the muddier, dirtier blues and greens will counter the red and pull it back.
And none of this is a test you can fail. You'll know within a few days whether a colour is right in a room, and finding out costs a couple of pounds.
@buildbysets; walls in Green 01. Photo: @emmalewisphotographer
@designinglilyspad; room colour drenched in Pink 01. Photo: @amiecharlot
And if you do repaint, don't start with the colour
Something I see constantly. Someone arrives having already decided: I need my room to be sage green. And then the sage green goes up and it doesn't quite work, and nobody can say why.
Start with the feeling instead. What do you want this room to feel like when you walk into it? Answer that first and the colour gets much easier, because you're no longer choosing from every green ever made.
Then describe what you're after properly. Not green, but a muddy olive with a yellow undertone. Not white, but a fresh, zesty white, or a muddier, dirtier one. Not red, but a burgundy, or a cinnamon, or a coffee brown. It sounds like a small thing and it isn't. People find colour genuinely hard to picture, and a colour that's been described in a way you can feel, sipping a hot chocolate, looking up at a fresh blue sky, is a colour you can actually choose.
Colour paralysis is a huge problem in this industry. Naming things properly is most of the cure.
Your checklist for this week
Work out when you're actually in the room. Morning, evening, or all day, that's the light you're decorating for.
Count your layers of light. You want three minimum: wall lights, table lamps, floor lamps. A simple turned wooden lamp base and a shade you like, in the corner that's currently doing nothing, will do more than you'd think.
Check your bulbs. Warm white, 2700–3000K, and get the bright white ones out of the living room. We've got dim-to-warm bulbs in our bedroom, and they go warmer still as you turn them down, which is exactly what you want last thing at night.
Look at the floor and the walls before the paint. A brighter rug to lift the floor, or a mirror hung where the light can actually find it.
Work out which way the room faces, then check your colour's undertone against it. Don't fight the room: light rooms stay light, dark rooms go mid-dark.
If it's north-facing, try an eggshell rather than a matt, and think about drenching the whole room in one colour.
Only then, order samples, and live with them for a few days before you decide. Peel-and-stick ones beat a painted patch here, because you can move them from wall to wall and look at them at different times of day, which is the entire point.
Nothing on that list is a weekend's work, and most of it costs less than a couple of tins of paint.
Your room hasn't gone wrong. The light has moved, the way it does every September, and it will move back. In the meantime you get to decide whether you meet it with more lamps or with a warmer undertone, and either answer is a good one.
Episode one is live
And while we're on rooms that need decisions made about them, I've got a whole house of them at the moment.
Episode one of my YouTube renovation series is officially live.
I've wanted to make longer-form content for such a long time, because there's only so much I can squeeze into a Reel or a newsletter, and I really want this series to be something you can take ideas, tips and tricks from for your own home too.
Episode one is very much the "before". I'm taking you on a full tour of the house as it was when we bought it, talking you through what we fell in love with, what definitely needs changing, and some of my initial ideas for each space.
This is going to be a completely real renovation, and I want to take you through the whole journey, the design decisions, colour choices, layouts, sourcing, and the things that go right and, inevitably, the things that don't!
There are around 12 episodes planned, with a new one every other week. So this really is just the beginning.
And please let me know what you think. I genuinely LOVE hearing from you. If there's anything you want me to cover in the series, or you have a question about your own renovation or decorating project, just reply to this email. I want these videos to be as useful to you as possible.
Tash x
Photographs from Master the Art of Colour. Credits as captioned.