The ‘wrong’ brown

I like to think that I have catholic taste when it comes to colour, and my home truly has no colour scheme as such. I don’t like to be tied down, and the idea of having things all in a certain colour just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t have matching kitchen accessories, for example, I simply buy what I want in the colour I like – job done. Hence, the look could be described as chaotic, or more charitably as eclectic

But I struggle with certain shades of brown. It’s not that I don’t like brown, because I do. There are just some browns that I find depressing. One of these is the rather lavatorial brown which has been sloshed around on many of the 17th century doors in the French house. Not only this, but someone has embellished the panels (very badly, complete with dirty-looking drips) in a deep cream/ yellow, which gives a completely revolting effect to some very grand old wooden doors. The backs of these doors, which are finished in a dark stain, look gorgeous but I didn’t have much luck when I tried to strip paint off so we will have to look into the best way to restore them to their full beauty

After a week alone in the house and having had some bad news from home, the brown got into my head and became more of a problem than the lack of any running water and heating (it was very cold at night), so I eventually caved and spent 2 hours on covering it up very quickly on a group of doors, just to give me a break

This colour is ‘mono’ by Little Green. It wasn’t the one I intended to use, but I didn’t have my glasses on when I read the paint tin label and I had painted 2 doors before I realised that it wasn’t drying as expected and spotted my mistake. It’s a smart and strongly pigmented blue-grey, a much cooler grey than I meant to use but a vast improvement anyway. Sanity was restored… short term, at least

Author: poshbirdy

Art deco/ art nouveau maniac enjoying a deep and meaningful relationship with alcohol View all posts by poshbirdy