For those of us who like things too much for coloured walls.
I’ve never quite trusted myself with coloured walls.
It isn’t that I don’t love them. I do. Some of the most memorable rooms I’ve ever walked into have been painted in deep, considered colour — a Farrow & Ball green in a London drawing room, a smoky terracotta in a Tuscan kitchen, the proper dark navy of an old library. When it works, there’s nothing like it.
The problem is me. I like things too much. Ceramics, books, lamps, paintings, the small considered objects that accumulate over years of sourcing and collecting and being unable to leave a market without something — they all end up somewhere, and they all want to be looked at. A strong wall colour ends up shouting over the lot of them. The room reads as cluttered even when it isn’t, because the eye doesn’t know where to rest.
For years I assumed this meant I had to choose. Quiet walls and considered objects, or coloured walls and a more disciplined approach to what goes in front of them. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise it was a false choice. The colour was never the problem. The location of the colour was.
The walls are the largest surface in any room and the hardest to change. Putting your strongest colour on them is committing your loudest decision to the least flexible part of the house. The English country houses I love most don’t actually do this — not in the rooms that work hardest. The walls are quiet. The furniture, the fabric and the objects are where the colour lives. You just don’t notice, because there’s so much of it, and because it’s all sitting at the height your eye actually rests at.
This is the approach I’ve ended up using in almost every project, and certainly in my own house.
Paint one piece of furniture, properly
Not the room. One piece. A bookcase in deep green against a bone-coloured wall. A small chest of drawers in oxblood at the end of a hallway. A spindle-backed chair in faded pink, tucked into a corner of an otherwise quiet bedroom. The painted piece does the job a painted wall would have done — it sets the temperature, anchors the colour story, gives the eye something to land on — but it can be moved, repainted, or sold when you’re tired of it. Walls can’t.
The piece worth painting is almost always vintage. New furniture in colour tends to look like it came that way. Vintage furniture in colour looks like a decision, which it is. A 1930s bookcase in a deep green has a confidence that a flat-pack equivalent can’t fake.
A skirted table in the corner
The skirted table is the most underrated piece of furniture in interior design. A small round table — anything will do, you can’t see it — dropped to the floor in a generous length of proper fabric. Linen, wool, a faded chintz, a heavy printed cotton. The fabric should puddle slightly. The legs should disappear.
What you’ve done is introduce a serious amount of colour and pattern at exactly the right height, while also creating a surface for a lamp and a stack of books, while also hiding the boxes and spare bedding and whatever else accumulates in the corner of a sitting room. It is the most economical piece of decorating.
Strong colour at window height warms the whole room without committing the walls. It also gives you a colour to repeat elsewhere — in the lampshades, in a cushion, in the binding of a rug — which is how rooms start to feel pulled together.
Curtains that puddle, in something with weight
A great deal of the warmth of an English room is in the curtains, and almost none of it is in the curtains most Australian houses end up with. Sheer panels half an inch off the floor are for offices. Curtains belong on the floor, gathered, in proper weight, in fabric that does something for the room rather than merely covering the window.
Linen in a deep tone. A wool blend. A faded chintz with age in it. Old curtains from a country house sale, taken in or let down. The colour matters less than the gathering and the weight — a strong-coloured curtain in thin fabric still reads as sad. A medium-coloured curtain in heavy linen reads as considered.
Strong colour at window height warms the whole room without committing the walls. It also gives you a colour to repeat elsewhere — in the lampshades, in a cushion, in the binding of a rug — which is how rooms start to feel pulled together.
Lean into ceramics and glass
This is where vintage earns its keep, and where the case for collected-not-decorated is at its most obvious.
A row of oxblood Fantoni-style pieces on a kitchen shelf. A cluster of amber Murano on a sideboard. A single tall cobalt vessel on a console table, with nothing else around it. A pair of mossy-green Bertoncello vases on a mantelpiece. The colour is intense — sometimes more intense than anything else in the room — but it’s at object level. You can move it. You can swap it. You can add to it.
Italian mid-century ceramics are particularly good for this because the palette is already extraordinary. The volcanic reds, the deep ochres, the bottle greens, the bone whites with a stripe of cobalt — these are colours you couldn’t easily get on a wall even if you tried, and certainly not in a way that holds the light the same way a glazed surface does.
The trick with ceramics is grouping. One vessel reads as ornament. Three of related palette and varied height read as a scheme. Don’t spread them across a room — concentrate them. A serious group on one shelf is worth ten individual pieces scattered through the house.
Mismatched cushions and a fabric lampshade
The two cheapest upgrades in the house, and the two that almost nobody gets right.
Cushions should not match. A pair of matching cushions on a sofa is the saddest thing in interior design — it’s the visual equivalent of someone who’s tried very hard not to make a mistake. Three or four cushions in different patterns and weights, loosely tied together by one shared colour, is what every English drawing room you admire is actually doing. A faded chintz, a stripe, a small geometric, a plain linen in a tone that picks up the chintz. The colour comes in through the pattern.
Lampshades, similarly. A pleated silk shade or a gathered linen one throws a warmer light than card, makes the lamp itself feel considered, and is the single fastest way to lift a room that feels a bit flat. Buy them vintage where you can — a 1960s shade rescued from a market, properly recovered, is a piece of decorating in its own right.
A note on what this isn’t
This isn’t a case against coloured walls. They’re wonderful, in the right house, for the right person. If you’re someone whose rooms are pared back, whose surfaces are mostly empty, whose objects are few and very considered, painted walls might be the best decision you ever make. The colour has room to breathe and isn’t competing with anything.
But if you’re someone whose rooms accumulate — books and ceramics and lamps and small pieces brought back from somewhere — and you’ve always assumed this meant you couldn’t have strong colour, you’ve been working from the wrong assumption. You can have it. You just need to put it somewhere that lets the things you love be looked at properly.
Quiet walls. One painted piece. A skirted table. Curtains that puddle. Ceramics in groups. Cushions that don’t match. A pleated silk shade.
That’s the whole scheme. It’s the way most of the rooms I love are actually put together, and it’s the way I’ve ended up working in my own house — because it turns out you don’t have to choose between colour and collecting. You only have to choose where the colour goes.