The only way is Downpipe: Farrow & Ball been sold to Danish company Hempel for £500 million
Everyone knows the name Farrow & Ball. It’s up there with heritage brands like Barbour and Aga, with a similar reputation for being expensive, classy and quintessentially British.
Now the poshest paint in the UK has been sold to Danish company Hempel for £500 million – an event that has been heralded as evidence that working from home during the pandemic has fuelled an interior design explosion, and the end of an era when Farrow & Ball was the paint that proved you had made it.
Is this the tipping point? The moment at which, by virtue of its extraordinary success, Farrow & Ball becomes the Waitrose of paint and no longer the exclusive choice for people in the know? In a new survey of what Brits consider to be truly posh, Barbour, Land Rover and Aga make the list but, notably, there is no mention of F&B.
Country Life
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May 10, 2021 A typical Midhurst cottage with its distinctive yellow trim as chosen by the Cowdray Estate. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
The colours that estate owners choose to paint their buildings and cottages lend them a highly distinctive feel. Eleanor Doughty finds out how and why the different shades are chosen.
If you drive through Midhurst in West Sussex, you’re likely to spot a house or two with their timbers painted neatly in saffron yellow. There has long been a tradition for estate owners to paint exterior timbers to signify ownership, but Cowdray’s yellow must surely be the most recognisable. It derives from when Liberal politician Weetman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray inherited the Cowdray estate in the 1920s and matched his political colours to his cottages painting the roses yellow, so to speak.
A statement space emerges from a detail-laden DIY.
By
Karin Vandraiss
4/29/2021 at 9:30am
Low-Key Lavish To upgrade this look for a slightly lower price, Caron found a mahogany toilet seat on Amazon; she also installed chic sanitary handles by Perrin and Rowe.
In late 2014, Lauren Caron left her job creating whimsical, lavish installations at Bergdorf Goodman to start her own retail and residential design collective. Less than a year later, her husband Jack took a job at Microsoft; in 2016 Caron found herself unpacking in a cottage on Capitol Hill. She still had a few clients in New York and planned to be a bicoastal firm on paper, but really, she was starting over.
Thursday 18 February 2021
Natalie Davies founded her eponymous interior design studio in 2014 after a successful career in marketing, and now designs residential projects across North Yorkshire and beyond. A member of BIID, she offers a complimentary home consultation for each client and is available for a flexible range of interiors services including colour schemes, furniture layouts, sourcing furniture, lighting and finishing touches.
Tell us about a recent project that you are really proud of?
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“I recently completed the redesign of a beautiful drawing room in a North Yorkshire Georgian country house. My brief was to update the décor to give the room a more contemporary feel in keeping with the age and style of the property and to create a space to entertain guests as well as somewhere for the family to relax and listen to music.