Off colour | 25 June 2015

In Competition No. 2903 you were invited to provide an extract from an article in an interiors magazine featuring some paint-colour names of your own invention that rival the ludicrousness of the real-life likes of ‘potentially purple’, ‘salty tear’ and ‘likeable sand’. High points in a patchy entry were Adrian Fry’s ‘Dresden licht’, John O’Byrne’s ‘failed rouble’, Alan Millard’s ‘hectic cockerel’, Mike Morrison’s ‘Magaluf mea culpa’ and Bill Greenwell’s ‘tartar’s lips’. Chris O’Carroll nabs the bonus fiver. The rest take £25 apiece.
 

The entryway is done in this season’s all-the-rage shade of über-sunshiny yellow, Flower Formerly Known as Rape, with bold highlights in Vein of Stilton and Real Bitter. Deeper into the mansion, in rooms where large windows and good exposure provide ample natural light, the design tends toward a still vibrant but more substantial palette — Matador for the ballroom and Apoplexy for the drawing room, with highlights of Well Spanked, Pale Woad and Cornwall Daphne. In the great picture gallery, where designers prudently chose to step back and let the portraits and landscapes assert themselves without competition, the walls are an appropriately muted Tear-Stained Diary, with woodwork done in Wraith. Similarly, the entrance to the conservatory does not seek to anticipate or outdo the hectic hues of the award-winning orchids and other plants, but rather greets visitors with icy, ephemeral understatements in Don’t Exhale Yet and Half-Remembered Fog.
Chris O’Carroll
 
A glossy Bovrilion front door swings open to reveal a delightfully niched vestibule. This is a room designed both to embrace and to usher, like a swooping hostess. The walls are boldly slab-dabbed in Life-Force Placenta, while the niches are picked out in a duo of stunning rossi, Pavarotti’s Tonsils vying with Quarantine Conjunctivitis. Gorgeous. But what a contrast when one moves into the drawing-room! Here, all is bony scraped canvas: two walls in the lost-white nostalgia of Much-Washed Underwear, the others in a cloudily clotted Mucilage.