Living with a strong colour

The usual verdict on a failed strong colour is that the shade was wrong. It is more often that the application was hedged. A deep colour on one wall of four, in a flat finish, lit by a single cool downlight, is being asked to succeed under conditions that would defeat any pigment.

A saturated colour behaves differently from a neutral because it reflects a narrow band of light and absorbs the rest. Put it on one wall and the three pale walls facing it bounce their own light back, and the deep wall reads as a flat panel stuck onto a lighter room. Nothing modulates it. The eye registers the join at every corner, and the colour looks like a decision that was interrupted. Carrying the same colour across walls, ceiling, woodwork and often the inside of the window reveal removes those joins. The room becomes a single volume rather than a set of surfaces, and the colour stops being an object and starts being an atmosphere. This is not a new idea, it is how most rooms were treated before the twentieth century separated wall colour from trim colour, but it has returned because it solves the specific problem that accent walls create. Finish does a large part of the work. A deep colour in a dead flat finish absorbs light so completely that the room can read as airless, particularly in the evening. The same colour in an eggshell or a mid sheen picks up reflections along cornices and skirtings, which gives the eye variation and stops the surface flattening out. Historically, dark rooms were kept alive by varnish, lacquer and polished plaster for exactly this reason. Any strong colour benefits from at least one surface in the room that returns light.

Light is the constraint that decides everything else. Before a colour is chosen, the room should be assessed for what it receives during the day and what it is given after dark, because those two conditions are frequently in conflict.

North facing rooms in northern latitudes receive cool, consistent, indirect light, which pushes blues and greys towards grey and drains warm reds. They tend to support deep, warm, complex colours: a dense green, a brown red, a strong ochre. South facing rooms take warm light for most of the day and can carry cooler saturated colours that would look cold elsewhere. In Mumbai and other tropical cities the calculation shifts again, because the light is stronger and more direct, and colours that appear rich in a London showroom can look bleached and slightly synthetic by midday. Artificial light is where most strong colours are lost, and it is usually the last thing considered. A low colour rendering index lamp, common in cheap LED fittings, simply cannot render a saturated pigment, and a carefully chosen deep colour will look muddy the moment the room is switched on. A lamp above 90 CRI, at a warm colour temperature, is not an upgrade in this context. It is the minimum condition for the colour to exist after sunset. Several light sources at different heights matter more than one bright ceiling fitting. There are rooms where the answer remains no. Spaces that are essentially circulation, seen for four seconds at a time and connected to several other rooms, rarely reward a strong colour, because the eye never settles long enough to adjust. Rooms dominated by large white appliances or sanitaryware set up a contrast that no amount of commitment resolves. And any room where colour is judged for work, a studio, a dressing area, a place where clothes or paint or food are assessed, needs a neutral field. Everywhere else, the failure is almost always timidity rather than the colour itself.