Colour Consultancy Case Study: Cathy’s Herefordshire Chalet

This week, we’re inviting you inside Cathy Chivers’ Herefordshire holiday rental, a Nordic chalet whose distinctive exterior you might recognise from Netflix UK’s Sex Education. Formerly made up of all-neutral rooms, the house has been utterly transformed by our tailored colour consultancy service into one full of cosy, characterful spaces.

The Service

“Colour consultancy is a service where we pull together all the colours for your home and create something that’s tailored to your lifestyle and your space,” says Kat Billings, the Farrow & Ball colour expert who helped Cathy choose the paint colours and finishes for The Chalet.

“A lot of people get to the point of choosing colour where it feels like the really exciting, fun part, but the choices can be overwhelming.”

There are all sorts of reasons that people use our colour consultancy service, but this overabundance of options was certainly the biggest motivator for Cathy. “When we first moved into the house it was technicolour, and I painted it neutral because I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “It was meant to be a stopgap!”

The Brief

“The brief that I gave was to inject some character into the house,” says Cathy. “It was very neutral, and I felt like it just needed something to lift it.”

This general principle helped Kat to guide the colour consultancy as a whole, but it was the treatment of individual spaces that really highlights the tailored nature of the service.

De Nimes No.299 in Modern Emulsion

In the living room, for example, Cathy knew that she wanted a deeper wall colour to serve as a backdrop for cosy evenings, one that would work with room’s existing and new furnishings as well as enhancing the greenery outside the window. At the other end of the house, in an attic bedroom, the goal was to create a feeling of more warmth.

Dead Salmon No.28 in Modern Emulsion; Manor House Gray No.265 in Estate Eggshell

The Process

For Cathy, a big part of what made the colour consultancy process so enjoyable was having the opportunity to work closely with a colour expert in a way that was friendly and informal.

“After we finished that process of going around the rooms, Kat showed me the colour fan and I could see all the colours together,” she says. “It was so exciting, because at that point I couldn’t wait to get started and see how the end result would look.”

Green Smoke No.47 in Exterior Eggshell

Inspired to be bold by Kat’s own confidence and expertise, Cathy was gently nudged out of her self-confessed comfort zone to consider colours she’d not thought of before – including deeper shades like De Nimes, Studio Green and Green Smoke – with sensational results.

Studio Green No.93 in Modern Eggshell; Shaded White No.201 in Estate Eggshell; Claydon Blue No.87 (Archive) in Modern Eggshell

The Results

“When I first saw the rooms after they’d been decorated, I just thought they’d been transformed,” says Cathy.

“Going from room to room, there is a flow to all the colours that Kat chose. She was also looking at the exterior colours of the house and making the rooms work with those, as well as the green of the outside, which I would have discounted completely. It was a lovely, lovely experience.”

Dead Salmon No.28 in Modern Emulsion; Manor House Gray No.265 in Estate Eggshell