Life stands still here.
Here we all are - moving through the busiest three months of the year. Creating beauty, making homes, Weaving narratives of who you are and how you want to live. Creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Harnessing light, creating space for happy gatherings as well as quiet places for one.
I set up Atelier Ellis to help people tell these stories, using colour and beautiful paint to wrap around humans.
When I make a new colour it is often based on a person - an impression, an artist, a writer or a muse. Clarissa is of course Mrs Dalloway. A novel that I feel seeps green, London streets and the beauty of people trying to find their way back to life. It is one of my favourite novels - and for Virginia Woolf - an ‘easy’ read.
Clarissa is also one of my favourite colours in our collection. It is the colour of my office in our London studio, and one which I know I’ll use again and again.
Colour helps us create a frame to live within, writers help us escape to the otherness. I hope you find a place for Clarissa and/or Mrs Dalloway in your home and life.
We create bio-based, breathable, natural colour and paint to help tell your story of home.
Atelier Ellis treasures home in its truest sense - as a container for everything. An almanac of our homes as the holder of our possessions, experiences, palettes, people and place.
We want your home to be an uplifting container for the life, stories and memories that happen there. are designed to envelop you and create spaces that are welcoming, calming and cocooning.
We craft our colours like an artist, using up to 10 pigments to create our perfectly complex, unique and nuanced shades. Every colour is both familiar and comforting, imagined from timeless human, nature and art-based ideas.
We hope they will inspire you to create the perfect backdrop for the way you wish to live.
Atelier Ellis x The Hepworth Wakefield
Molten chocolate, full-fat milk, grass that is greener, the visceral pink of bone marrow and the quiet, deep of the night. Colours for everyone, in art and at home.
Introducing a creative partnership with The Hepworth Wakefield for the Spring/Summer 2025 exhibition season.
A collection of seven bespoke colours for the exhibitions of Helen Chadwick and Caroline Walker, which will be on view at The Hepworth Wakefield until the 27 October 2025.
Working closely with the exhibition curators, the colours have each been specially created to respond to the artists’ work. Chadwick’s practice embraces the sensuous aspects of the natural world and often incorporates unexpected mediums, such as chocolate, flowers, snow and milk, while Caroline Walker’s intimate paintings offer a lens into the everyday lives of women.
The palette has been meticulously crafted to enhance the viewing experience of the exhibitions, in quiet support of the curatorial expertise
These colours are available to order in all Atelier Ellis finishes and 10% of proceeds are going to support the gallery.
Hello London
Welcome to our new studio and factory in Bermondsey.
From our journal
Is it madness to desire so much, when we can hold so little?
High summer, holidays taken, waters swum. Homes are ruffled, a little messy even – things are not guest-level best. These last few weeks of summer are for roaming around – out and about, but also at home. The shuffling of crockery and furniture, a repainted front door – the annual combat to coil the hose.
This can be a time we feel slightly dissatisfied with what we have – or don’t have. We tire of what we already own. A rising sense of an unfulfilled desire. A new bed will solve ‘x’, two new lamps ‘y’. It’s normal to desire new things for home – it is our cradle. We want it to show ‘this is who we are’.
Tweaks, fluffs and additions are all part of the pleasure of having a home in which we are allowed to imprint ourselves. But to seek more for the sake of more new or just more, is a different thing entirely. A treadmill of desire that can never be satisfied. If you buy filler things or things for the sake of it – once you are used to them, you’re back on the hunt again. A seasonal lamp is just that.