We create natural, breathable, bio-based colour and paint to help you tell your story of home and place.
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. Our intensely pigmented, en terré colours 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.
Explore our colours
A gentle and simple evolution – natural, breathable, bio-based paint
We’ve elevated our beautiful True Matt Emulsion to a bio–based formula.
This evolution of our natural paint base includes a newly developed, beautiful, natural based binder – which is also new to the UK. We’ve formulated it to be better for people and their homes.
Our new, renewable, natural-based binder is created from bio-based materials including vegetable oil produced from waste, castor oil, linseed oil, sugar and bio ethanol. It improves both the materiality and performance of our already exceptional quality, virtually VOC free and fully breathable paint.
We also offer complete transparency of our ingredients and source locations. We source over 95 % of our materials from the UK, with the remainder coming from Europe.
With a unique colour palette created by Cassandra Ellis, our bio-based True Matt Emulsion is exceptionally matt and clean smelling. It is suitable for lime and gypsum plaster and is washable and safe for all rooms, including kitchens, bathrooms and children’s spaces.
Maps of Colour
Somewhere in that gathering of ‘things’ will be you, your home and the colours you want to live with.
For every colour in our natural paint collection, we have arranged a family of eight that we know will work together beautifully. Two whites, two neutrals, two mid-tones, a deep and a surprise. You may want to use all of them or just two, but knowing that this colour leads to that colour, should lead you down a more creatively fulfilling pathway.
Like a beautiful map of colour it also means you are at the centre of it all – which is the best path we can each take.
Wayfinder
In the last week, I have been in more homes than usual. Helping close friends who are so very nearly at the point of colouring in their home. A new friend whose house is freshly renovated but needs a colour adjustment to make it feel right. An artist who wants colours to support her important exhibition, and a client who is crafting a magnificent yet deeply personal home. All completely different people, with different needs and wants - yet all looking for the same. Not the same colour, nor the same aesthetic, just something that says – this is me; this is we; this is us. I believe if you start with this sentence before seeking any samples or stepping into any showrooms, then your path will be so much more pleasurable.
Helping people find their personal palette is like breathing for me – finding the right colour or colours is part of it but understanding the way into someone’s story of home – well that is magic – and a privilege.
I am of course one person – and we all have our own way of seeing the world and how we would like to feather a nest. This week someone told me my home was ‘rustic’ – I don’t think he was being generous. He mistook my delight in and collection of quills and stones as crafty, rather than the ultimate version of crafted. I don’t believe that mankind can improve upon the striations of a raven’s feather, but there our opinions lay divided. And that is the beauty of finding our own creative path. My rustic to your sleek. Another’s nuanced neutrals instead of complex contrasts.
It’s why I created our Maps of Colour. You think of a colour or colours that you would like to live with and then our maps help you find the road less travelled by. Think of the maps as a friend that always gives you a well counselled ‘thumbs up’. We all need friends like this.
Wayfinder was created with this thought. Robert Frost and Edward Thomas wrote of roads and paths and the importance of finding your own way. We are all unique and so our homes should be too.
