COLOR CONSULTATION

Color Farrow and Ball Pink Ground N°202 / Wimborne White N°239 / Off Black N°57, tables Maisons du monde and string of lights Lightonline.fr 

 Hello my kittens, 

I’m back this week with the first part of our office-story, don’t worry there won’t be 12 episodes like the Star Wars Saga, only two, but it’s important that we explain the process…So, as I had mentioned before, we gained back a whole room when our ex-officemates moved out, and yes, just imagine that less than a year ago there were 10 of us here…And not just ten people behind their computer screens, but cutting wood, sewing, and cutting up mountains of paper... Hiroshima 1945, every day of the week. 

Pink Ground N°202 / Wimborne White N°239 / Off Black N°57

The walls were painted blue/grey/dreadful, the door frames and doors were a weird storm-cloud grey, but in any case it was just a temporary situation until we found a better place, and it was also already a good thing to have an office other than at home, anywhere else, as long as I am leaving my apartment, wearing real clothes and not just hanging around in jogging pants until 6 pm…So it was supposed to be temporary, but it ended up being 9 long months of blue/grey/dreadful and not-really-unpacked boxes…So today, I am going to tell you how to “transform” an office entrance into a cozy workspace, with the help of just a little splash of color…As for furniture, we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

For the renovation of the office, I was fortunate to collaborate with the famous paint store Farrow and Ball, and was entitled to a real “color consultation,” almost like as if I were going to see the doctor because my work space was causing me physical pain. I was craving colors, a wall like that, paneling like this, and only one inspirational picture, this one. But I had absolutely no idea just how much a color could delineate a space, and organize a room, oh how naïve I was. So one day, a color specialist, Geoffrey from the Farrow and Ball boutique in the Marais, came to the office, listened to my needs, I felt like I was lying down on a coach to talk to him about my decorating anxiety, my “pinterestable” wishes, my passion for the lemonade studio and my addiction to polka dots. Geoffrey literally analyzed the room, and said: “We’ve got our work cut out for us.” No kidding!

And then he took out his color chart, showed me shades of pink, white and black, and just like a magician, he came up with a plan for the organization of the room. Well, I grant you that you need to have imagination and talent to visualize like that, but I knew he understood what the office needed, and what we wanted to do.

As you can see, all the office doors were dark and brown glaze finish, and as a result, it was as if we found ourselves in the entrance of a whole other space. We would enter the office and automatically have a sense of the flow guiding you towards the double black door, "winking at you," as if to say “this way, friends.” So we "erased" all the doors by painting them the same color as the walls. And we delimited the work area with a large solid color pink, and a think black border. The pink solid color draws an "L" in the room and the black border starts at the bottom of the door frame, and continues all the way around to mark off the "work" space.

 Furniture found at La Petite Brocanteuse, repainted with Setting Plaster N°231.

And I know what you’re going to say, there’s still that polystyrene ceiling tile, I’m looking for the word to define this ceiling. I don’t want to be crass, so I won’t say it, but I think you get what I mean ... Well, there aren’t 36 ways to do it because it is a fire retardant ceiling etc ... But to limit the visual aggression of the neon lights and the imitation granite slabs, we opted for two solutions: the first one being to never turn on the neon lights and ignore the switches. And more seriously, to create a diversion, I wanted to put up a string of light bulbs, creating a kind of dancehall atmosphere, I found strings of light with sockets and cables at Light on line, but I’d better wait till tomorrow to show you that. It is a tactic to divert your attention away from the ceiling. And it makes for very soft lighting, totally insufficient to work in, but tomorrow we will show you our other indirect lighting solutions.

 Skimming Stone N°241 / Wimborne White N°239 and lemon yellow Yellow Ground N°218

And for our “meeting / lounge / waiting room / lunch just us” corner of the office, Geoffrey suggested paneling in beige Skimming Stone N°241 in an L shape, and that we make an “anamorphosis” of a lemon in the corner.  Oh yeah, so to make an anamorphosis, we had the beautiful Alexandra B. come over with her projector and she projected an image of a lemon in the corner angle of the room. She then drew the outline and we painted it lemon Yellow Ground N°218 paint! 

I am oh so excited to show you what’s coming next! Meet back here tomorrow for the second part – decorating! 

Translated by Ida Driscoll