Pushing out the colour boat has paid dividends in this terrace house – moving from rich to fresh, the shades here hit all the right notes
LIVING ROOM
‘Because the terracotta was intended to create a warm Mediterranean vibe, a pale ceiling seemed incongruous. And I often paint ceilings – breaking up that visual space with white makes a room look smaller,’ says designer Pandora.
LIVING ROOM
The transition between dark and light is striking here.
Playing with colour can feel risky when you don’t have a huge amount of interior design experience. Siobhan and Willis Wells, who’d bought their house shortly before Covid, ‘wanted to be pushed with colour’, albeit with the guidance of interior designer Pandora Taylor. So push them she did – ‘to the next level’.
After all, this home was to be a place for entertaining. ‘The Wellses are a fun, young couple. They wanted friends to come over and be surprised,’ says Pandora. With this in mind, she set out to create a ‘really playful mood with unexpected elements’. Paint colour, she says, is abrilliant tool for creating maximum impact, ‘especially on alesser budget’. Not only does a striking palette create a powerful first impression, she notes, it also leaves a clear lasting impression. ‘You might want to spend lots of money on a sofa, but what your brain remembers is the mood and the light, and that’s created by colour. So I always encourage clients to be more adventurous with it.’
Pandora’s usual starting point is the ‘key rooms’. For the living room, the couple were keen on terracotta, so she applied Farrow & Ball’s Book Room Red ‘absolutely every where, to create drama and impact’. Everything from the skirting to the ceiling was covered: ‘That’s super unusual and unexpected, and created a great backdrop for everything else in the room.’
It was important to carry that colour story through the core of the house, adds Pandora: ‘You want to be able to open the doors to the rooms upstairs and for it to make sense.’ Using terracotta as a ‘connecting colour’, she ran varying hues of pink throughout the interior, using paint, tiles, curtains and upholstery.
The hallway was another key space. ‘Being the first place you walk into, it needs to have impact,’ says Pandora. Wanting to inject more colour than the Wellses’ initial choice of French Gray, she went instead for Farrow
