Lunching Ladies: the visual story behind the launch of our Maps of Colour

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7 Aug

Choosing colour is intimate. A river running, the slick of a horse’s rump, a painting of flowers, Keats, friendships, the flight of a lark and a brown paper parcel tied up with string - are all primeval and real sources of joy for someone. And they say “this is me, this is home”. Being your own advisor with colour, nuance and detail feels to me, to be the right way forward.

In July we launched our Maps of Colour - our gift to our customers and a guide to creating your very own colour palette. For every colour in our collection, I arranged a path of eight that I 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, I hope makes choosing easier and a much more creatively fulfilling approach.

To create the right colour story, we want people to start with gathering elements, ideas and places that feel unthinkingly them. Somewhere in that gathering of ‘things’ will be you and yours, your home and the colours you want to live with.

“A river running, the slick of a horse’s rump, a painting of flowers, Keats, friendships, the flight of a lark and a brown paper parcel tied up with string- all primeval and real sources of joy.”

Our visual story is a path towards or from Lunching Ladies, which works beautifully with some or all of these colours: Bright Star, Milk, Lark, Paper & String, Winifred Green, At The Bay, All the Queen’s Horses and Plume.

For the launch of our Maps of Colour we undertook a visual exploration of that gathering of ‘things’ in the Lunching Ladies map.

Beginning with our Lunching Lady muse, a book of Keats’ letters to Fanny gives us the beauty of Bright Star. “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days” - one of the most beautiful sentences to be written from one to another. Milk in a beautiful glass bottle is an ode to simple living and quiet, easy things. Lark, a fleeting bird and Plume a handful of feathers - whimsical reminders of flight and freedom. Nostalgic hand tied parcels of waxy paper and humble string give us Paper & String. Winifred Nicholson is one of my favourite artists - and a source of great inspiration and pleasure. Her paintings are immersive teachers in colour. At The Bay is our river running - and a memory for me of a barefoot and watery childhood in New Zealand. All The Queen’s Horses a marker of early mornings in Chelsea alongside the Guards out hacking.

All of these things gather together to create something more than the sum of the parts - a home, and a story of someone who has lived a life, of markers and memories.