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For those who are determined to preserve the essence of the middle of the century of their Golden Lane apartments, or to choose the most appropriate color for their Victorian wrought iron balustrades, all roads lead to papers and paintings. The Chelsea's Park Walk DIY store has a team of experts in color history and its cards samples are organized by time, shades of pale stone privileged by 19th century decorators in “poppre” and “hot mustard” colors from the 1960s.
Now in his 65th year, Papers and paintings Opened in 1960 as a typical decoration supplier, although the founder, Robert Baty, would mix personalized formulations to match the painting that customers of customers have brought, while advising them on the choices of colors. “My father had accidentally created a niche as a kind of man's painting workshop,” said his son Patrick Baty, who joined the company in 1980 and still heads it today with his wife, Alex.
Shortly after joining, Baty noticed a recurring theme. “People came with requests for information about the colors of the past,” he recalls. It could have been the tonal preferences of the neoclassical architect Robert Adam (“Psyche” green and “Hebe” pink) or the interior Design of the prohibited city, the Imperial Palais complex in Beijing (centered on a shiny “Moorish red”). Determined to help his father, “rather naively”, Baty decided to find them answers. In 1991, he started a research diploma, investigating the colors used between English houses from the 17th to the 19th century. In the archives of the Scottish register house, he came across a brown envelope filled with samples of colors painted by 1807. “It was incredible,” he said, like finding a dulux color card in 200 years. “He used the samples to form the range of traditional colors of the shop, which has nuances of” wise “,” fishing flower “and” straw “. Large painting companies have followed suit with their own heritage collections, based on historical tales which it describes, mattly, as being” somewhat mythical “.
Before Baty finished his studies, he was approached by the National Trust to help the restoration of the Majestic House in Dutch style. A flow of consulting projects followed, including Tower Bridge, the British Museum, the Kensington Palace and the V&A. For everyone, Baty discovered the original wall colors of the buildings as well as the different diagrams that followed. And so, on the basis of his research, articles and paintings have added new ranges for the 1920s, with pastels such as “Shuffle Blues” and “Bell Pink”, the 1930s, including “Smoke” Gray and “Metropolitan” red, and the “Camouflage colors” of the 1940s, which are surprisingly popular in modern kitchens. The project completed the loop when Baty created a collection of the 1960s based on the first records of the store.
Today, these shades are displayed in the narrow store in western London, its white white walls and “Blue Fenching” (a soft gray-green) maleed by color graphics. All the nuances are available in finishes, including the shiny, the mast and the egg shell (from £ 60 for 2.5 l) with an additional £ 40 to mix a custom color. An important part of the store service is color correspondence. Customers can bring a piece of wallpaper (or a stable Victorian door, a book jacket or a set of Tibetan prayer flags) and the staff uses a spectrophotometer, a measurement device that allows perfectly precise color correspondences, to search for the database of hundreds of thousands of colors, built from decades of other customers. Staff expertise is unrivaled: a former employee was at the head by Apple to work at his head office at Silicon Valley.
Visitors range from local craftsmen and DIY enthusiasts inside designers Like Ben Pentath and Kate Guinness. Over the years, the store has welcomed Superman The actor Christopher Reeve and the businessman Angus Ogilvy (hoping to surprise his wife, Princess Alexandra, with a new setting). The requests they hear are deliciously diverse. A customer transported a small amount of yellow earth behind a cascade in Penrith and had it matching masonry to bring the palette of the Cumbrian landscape to his townhouse in London.
With the complete historical collection, Patrick and Alex, who supervise the daily race of the shop, collect colors during their trips; A typical example, “French exterior colors”, imitates the colors used on ancient wooden shutters. Meanwhile, Baty devotes her time to a range of advice projects. This could mean a visit to the Hogarth staircase cage at St Bartholomew hospital, where he chose a stone color so that the ceiling and the cornices consistent with the artist's murals, or Palm House of Kew Gardens, where his discovery of a piece of irony that had escaped. “While I walk in the West End, almost every hundred meters, there is a building on which I worked,” he said in a neutral tone. “But I always receive a buzz because there is always something new to learn.”
Papers and paintings4 Park Walk, Chelsea, London SW10; @PapersandPaints
