Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.To say that Farrow & Ball colour curator Joa Studholme likes to live with her paints is an understatement – to enter her Somerset home is to know that she practically inhabits them. Seated at the large, beautifully weathered oak kitchen table, with her scruffpot dog Tufnell (named for the retired English cricketer Phil Tufnell) at her feet, Studholme is surrounded by a patchwork of art, ceramics and decorative objects. There are rows of assorted glassware, animalistic jugs and lines of Sriracha sauce bottles – meaningful bits and bobs that inhabit every surface. The large window frames a scene of ancient English oaks and grazing dairy cows. Studholme lives in a former 19th-century schoolhouse built in Castle Cary stone and enfolded in hills: an appropriate location for a baptism in paint. She recently moved permanently to Somerset (she formerly split her time between this house and one in London), and the house and its surroundings have cast their spell. Alongside an immersion in nature, she says, “there’s a quietness here that makes the colours I create more considered”. It’s a subtlety that comes to the fore in the new collection of 12 paints that Studholme has produced with creative director Charlotte Cosby.Right now, she is drawn to old-school tints – nothing too fresh or clean. “I just know that it’s stillness that people want at the moment,” she says of the gentle yet striking shades. Born out of careful observation, these new tones reflect the beauty of the everyday: the overlooked household humdrum, or what a friend of hers calls “ordinary treasures”. Douter, named after the smudged, sooty bronze of a candle snuffer – which she calls the lovechild of Farrow & Ball’s Inchyra Blue and Green Smoke – came first. A new yellow shade is inspired by her houseproud mother’s freshly washed dustersStudholme started her career in advertising before joining F&B in 1996, initially helping with the launch of its first Fulham showroom, before becoming a colour curator. And while she has seen many trends come and go, she’s lately noticed a colour revival in interiors. “This collection is a dalliance with strong colours that are easy to love – they feel like old memories,” she says. A perk of the job: she gets to dream up all of the brand’s clever – and occasionally deliberately esoteric – names. Duster, which renders the muted, and wonderfully murky, yellow tones of a sullied cleaning cloth, is perhaps the most nostalgic – and personal – of the new colours. “It connects to a childhood memory of my houseproud mother’s freshly washed dusters, which I would sit and carefully fold,” says Studholme of growing up in 1960s Surrey, where her strongest colour recollection is the green vinyl Formica table in the kitchen. Its muddied shade is not dissimilar to Dibber, named by her green-fingered husband after the handy horticultural tool that makes holes in the ground for planting seeds. “All these colours are inspired by something close to home,” she says of what is the company’s first new line in two and a half years. Studholme is a staunch believer that colours should harmonise with their environment; so obsessive is her pursuit of the perfect Pantone that when her children were younger she had to promise to keep their former west London hallway the same colour just so they’d know they’d returned to the right home. Aged 10, she was already painting the insides of cupboards yellow to create a sense of surprise, later daubing her adolescent bedroom in the darkest of greens. “My mother tells me that I used to describe experiences using colour,” she says. “I’d call it ‘the holiday with the pink sky’.”For those looking for advice on how to use colour, she suggests creating tonal shifts throughout an interior – moving from lighter into darker shades as you transition through the day. One of her first decorative moves after buying the house in Somerset seven years ago was to create School House White for the walls. She suggests introducing colour as unexpected details – painting the legs of a chair, a trim or a single detail in a vivid colour, then building up in bravery from there. Scarlet doors have become a signature.She points to a huge antique crockery cabinet that fills the far wall of her kitchen. It is painted in Marmelo, a burnished orange derived from the Portuguese word for quince, which is a colour that lends character and cheer. The radiator cover and kitchen units are coated in Reduced Green, a brownish, barely there tone. She also experiments with saturated shades in smaller, more intimate spaces – her pantry, for instance, is painted in Naperon, a faded terracotta and one of the new 2025 colours. Or she simply paints half or three-quarters of the way up the wall. The guest rooms in her home’s timber-framed new wing, conceived by local architects Bindloss Dawes, are deliberately bold. “I want to give guests a visual treat,” she says of a breezy Sap Green (from the 2019 line created with the Natural History Museum) and soft Pink Cup sleeping space, with an accompanying bathroom complete with matching harlequin-pattern painted floors.Occasionally, though, the right tone is none at all. Studholme’s own bedroom is washed in Stirabout, an existing F&B colour inspired by Irish porridge, and chosen for its absence of hue. “I wanted it to feel as though you’re floating in a canopy of trees,” she says, surveying the fields and sky beyond. “It cocoons you in tranquillity.” Tranquillity is surely a shade shift we all need.
