Show Notes
Ten episodes of colour advice have all ended the same way: it depends on your light. This one is about the light itself. The constraint is latitude. London sits level with Newfoundland and Edinburgh not far off Moscow, and in December parts of this country get seven hours of daylight, most of it overcast. Overcast light is diffuse and cool, so everything under it reads cooler than the paint chart promised. That, rather than fashion, is why cool grey went wrong here and warm neutrals are comin...
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The last one for now, and it's the opposite of everything else we've done. Not what's changing, but what doesn't, and how you go about buying it. Median UK renovation spend is £20,000 and planned spend for this year halved to £10,000, so this isn't an episode about buying expensive things. It's about where a smaller budget should go, which is a different and more useful question. The trade answer is buy less, buy better, and the word doing the work is craftsmanship, which means nothing becaus...
Fourteen episodes reporting what's in and what's out, and we have never once asked who decides. This is the one where we turn round and look at our own sources. A colour of the year is part trend forecasting, part sales data, and part a committee deciding what to sell. Pantone have been doing theirs since 1999 and Dulux since about 2004, and it started as a signal to manufacturers and retailers roughly eighteen months ahead of anything reaching a shop. By the time it's reported as news, the p...
Seventeen percent of British homeowners put more storage on their improvement list this year, which puts it level with a garden makeover and above a home office, an outdoor entertaining space and smart home technology. Nobody wants storage. That's what makes the number interesting. It's on the list because there's a problem, not because there's a want. Why we haven't got any is structural rather than aesthetic. Victorian houses were built for people who owned fewer things, so there are no fit...
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