Paint Guide

Always start with a colour palette before starting to pick out paints. What I often do, for myself and for clients, is working from a fabric or a wallpaper swatch that I love. I initially worked with the discontinued Cath Kidston Birds & Roses wallpaper for my own home. I pick about 4 colours to work with; white, pink, blue and green and I add-on with colour variations. I also never shop outside my colour palette, that way everything will compliment each other and I’ll not end up with unwanted items in the attic or overspending on unwanted items.

Paint

My go to paint is Sigma Tigron Aqua Satin and the Sigma Tigron Aqua Primer. I use this paint for all woodwork and indoor surfaces such as furniture. It’s a beautiful eggshell paint and has a great flexibility to work with. For walls I use Histor Perfect Finish matte, this is actually a quite modestly priced latex paint and after lots of testing this comes out the best. For floors I use Sigmafloor.

Mixing Colours

I so do love all the Farrow & Ball colours but I’m not really fond of their paint as it’s too chalky to my taste. You can use their colour numbers instead and let your local paint shop mix them using the paint of your choice. For example when you want Farrow & Ball All White to be mixed using a different paint use the code FAR 2005 and so on.If you want to work with colour numbers from Little Greene use: LGCOE + number. For example Little Greene Slaked Lime Mid will be LGCOE 105

Tips & Tricks

• work with primers mixed in the top coat colour that way you can see if the colour works for you, if not you can go for another top coat colour but you can keep using the primer. Also primers mixed in the top coat colour will make life so much easier as you need to apply fewer coats and your top coat colour will be much deeper and richer.

• Use water-based paints for everything besides floors and stairs. Water-based paints dry much faster so you’ll be able to apply more coats in a shorter time period. Water-based paints are also better for the environment and for your health.

• Don’t use masking tape on windows but use a glass scraper instead. It’s faster this way and water-based paint is easier to remove as glue remains.

• If you paint walls, put a roller on a broomstick as it will go so much faster and you can work in evenly strokes up and down.