Find your home’s TRUE SEASON
Love pastel walls? You’re a Spring. Persian rugs? Embrace Autumn. Get ready for the new trend in decor — you’ll never reach for the magnolia paint again!
Thursday night and I am sitting at a pale wooden dining table in a room with deep purple walls ( I’m putting my money on Farrow & Ball’s Brinjal — guessing F&B paint colours from 20 metres is my middle- class superpower), as rain lashes against the plateglass windows.
a burnt orange velvet sofa and a leafy green tumble of houseplants brighten up a corner. The lively conversation of nine other women drowns out the sound of the rain.
I could be at a book club. In fact, I’m in a room set in a London branch of habitat, waiting to discover how finding my home’s ideal colour ‘season’ — whether it is spring, summer, autumn or winter — might revolutionise my approach to decorating.
I am on slightly familiar ground. Back in the Nineties, my mother took me to have my colours done. I’d started my first job in publishing and everyone I worked with wore black, lending the office a cheery funeral parlour air.
Mum had heard of a woman in a neighbouring village who was a consultant for Colour Me Beautiful, the company launched by Carole Jackson in the Eighties after her book of the same name became a worldwide bestseller. This is how I found myself in the spare bedroom of an elaborately made-up woman as she spent half an hour draping various coloured scarfs around my neck, like a suburban salome, before declaring me a Winter.
‘you’re lucky! This is the most dramatic season of all!’ she said. The upside was I could wear black. The downside was I was expected to wear it with fuchsia.
at habitat, just as I am beginning to worry I might have to learn to incorporate fuchsia into my living room décor, our tutor, interior designer sophie robinson, announces: ‘This is nothing to do with Colour Me Beautiful!’
I feel a wave of relief. SHE
explains the method she uses was first devised by angela Wright, a psychologist who, in the Eighties, studied people’s emotional relationships with colour and divided them into four groups, roughly aligned to the seasons. yet although no coloured scarves are involved, the process feels familiar.
Once you have found your home decor ‘season’, the idea is that it helps you shop with greater confidence and make bolder choices.
But it’s not just about colour. This seasonal strategy helps you cut through the myriad choices available, and find the styles of furniture, even the textures and accessories which will help you to create a home that feels as good as it looks.
We’ve come from south London, Bedfordshire and Kent. There’s a young mother who wants to know how to transform a rented flat into a welcoming home when she’s not allowed to touch the cream walls; a grandmother keen to create a cheerful space for her grandchildren, and a professional decorator seeking advice on how to persuade her nervous clients to make bolder choices.
In front of us, like a particularly genial head girl, is sophie, also a guest judge on BBC Two’s The Great Interior design Challenge. On her website, she introduces herself with: ‘I’m sophie robinson, and I’m bonkers for colour, and own far too many cushions!’
she’s cheerfully Tiggerish, embracing colour as a backlash against the property flipping obsessions of the Noughties, which meant everywhere looked the same. Now, she wants to call time on the dreary beigeing of Britain, one seasonal colour board at a time.
sophie explains that we’ll be creating mood boards to help us identify our home’s season.
By going with our gut instinct and picking out what we’re immediately drawn to, she says, we’ll seldom get it wrong.
We make mistakes when we choose things because they are the latest trend, or because we’ve slavishly recreated a look we’ve seen in a magazine or online.
she’s wary of how decorating is becoming driven by people who take their inspiration from pictures posted on social media.
‘ Pinterest and Instagramcopycat interiors often lead to disappointment because they’re not authentic. It’s someone else’s idea of what’s good.
‘you can tell when people are in the wrong houses. They look uncomfortable.
‘Just look at the footballers with those homes in the Cheshire style, a strong Winter look. They’re often young families — they don’t even look like they live in those houses.’
as we begin cheerfully ripping pages out of magazines, snipping up bits of coloured paper and sticking them to boards, it’s surprising how quickly our interiors’ identities emerge.
sophie says: ‘This is what it’s all about. Finding your colour personality, focusing less on your head, trusting your gut.’
ByThE end of our session, I feel calmer, but emboldened. I’d arrived thinking I would paint the walls of bookcases in my new study, well, as sort of greige (grey/beige), and I came out fixed on a rich, dark blue (‘Blue is very good for intellectual endeavour,’ sophie says).
I’m comforted, too. I think of how I dropped a dizzying amount of money on having a sofa reupholstered in house of hackney fabric, the 21st-century inheritors of the William Morris tradition, and how I hadn’t regretted it for a second.
I’d subconsciously picked something that was perfect for me, proving sophie’s point that going with your instinctive taste almost always works.
Then, I take a look at my mood board. a mixture of old floorboards, Persian rugs, botanical prints and vintage linen curtains
— I’m clearly a dyed-in-the-handspun-wool Autumn.
I’ve selected the things I’m naturally drawn to, I haven’t filtered my taste through what’s fashionable, and somehow the scheme really hangs together.
It’s the essence of all the things I already love in my home, and it couldn’t be more autumnal if it transformed itself into a pumpkin and started singing We Plough The Fields And Scatter.
As we pack up our things, the young mother looks ready to stamp her own style on her rental, and the grandmother clutches a spring-infused mood board of lively bright pastels which is so appealing that, for a minute, I feel envious of her grandchildren.
But no. These days I am a proud Autumn. I go out into the night determined to ditch the pastels, banish the greys and transform my home into a ripe peach of a rustic palace.
WHICH COLOUR SEASON ARE YOU? SPRING
Do you love to fill a room with plants and flowers, and keep window treatments simple to let the light flood in? A wall of junk shop paintings charmingly jumbled together? you’re probably a Spring.
Spring people are high energy, youthful and uplifting. They like lots of natural light, pale wood, painted furniture, pretty pastels, cutesy gingham and busy prints.
Spring types love informal, joyful and sociable spaces. Their muse is Cath Kidston, known for the cutesy-kitsch prints she scatters over her homeware.
SUMMER
Summer personalities are altogether less dizzy than impetuous Springs. They’re restrained, discerning and want only the best, but they are neither showy nor flash. Their look is about quality, not cash, though it can be very expensive to achieve.
These interiors exude the soft, hazy languor of balmy Sunday afternoons in August.
They have a sense of romance and faded grandeur and are decorated in cool, delicate colours such as greyish blues, lilacs and soft pinks.
Are you drawn to soft rose pinks or muted blues? Love chalky, muted colours combined with painterly prints and watercolours? That’s the natural Summer style.
This is an elegant, understated aesthetic, where quality is important. Think tactile velvets, silks and cashmere, and billowing, painterly prints. The superstar decorator in this style is rose uniacke, known as the Queen of Serene, and interior designer to the Beckhams.
AUTUMN
AuTumn is all about intense hues and abundance. Think log fires, richly coloured dahlias, ripe fruit and golden leaves, and an emphasis on comfort.
If you naturally surround yourself with glowing copper, earthy terracotta, tweed and raw silks, you’re probably an Autumn. Autumn people are passionate, with strong connections to nature and craftsmanship.
‘ They’re often academics, journalists, people who like to be on their soap boxes,’ says Sophie. ‘William morris (the renowned Victorian artist and socialist) is the archetypal Autumn designer, a campaigner, a man on a mission.’
Today’s quintessential Autumn designer is Ben Pentreath, the proponent of a modern, eclectic style who masterminded the decoration of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Kensington Palace apartments.
WINTER
ALL cutting- edge drama with stark contrasts, saturated colour (hello fuchsia, my old friend), and hard textures such as granite and marble.
Sophie says Winter people are the conspicuous consumers of the four seasonal types. They are bold, confident, and decisive. They know their own minds and aren’t afraid to let you know what they think.
‘It can be very bling: “I made a ton of money and I want everyone to know about it.” ’
It’s the only colour palette that has pure black and pure white in it — they kill other colour schemes stone dead, but Winter can take it.
The style can be expensively minimalist, or at its most dramatic — an explosion of ostentatious high luxe as seen on screen in the homes of reality queens, the Kardashians.
For more seasonal colour palette inspiration, check out Sophie’s website, sophie robinson.co.uk. Visit habitat. co.uk/colour for more details.