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To say that Farrow & Ball Joa Studholme’s color curator likes to live with her paintings is euphemism: entering her Somerset house is knowing that she practically dwells them. Sitting on the great wardted oak kitchen table, with his dog Scuffot Tufnell (named for the retired English Crick player Phil Tufnell) at his feet, Studholme is surrounded by a mosaic of art, ceramics and decorative objects. There are varied crystal ranks, animal jugs and silly salsa bottles, significant bits and bobs that inhabit each surface. The great window frames a scene of old English oaks and grazing dairy cows.
![Joa Studholme in the kitchen of his house of Somerset](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F8af8479c-4188-4510-94c4-65d3f592b807.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1)
Studholme lives in an old nineteenth -century school built in Castle Cary Stone and wrapped in hills: an appropriate location for a painting baptism. Recently moved permanently Somersault (He previously divided his time between this house and one in London), and the house and its surroundings have launched their spell. Together with an immersion in nature, he says: “Here is a tranquility that makes the colors that I believe more consider.” It is a subtlety that stands out in the new collection of 12 paintings that Studholme has produced with the creative director Charlotte Cosby.
At this time, it is attracted to the dyes of the old school, nothing too fresh or clean. “I only know that it is still that people want at this time,” he says about the soft but striking tones. Born from a careful observation, these new tones reflect the beauty of the everyday: the rumor of the last home, or what a friend of his calls “ordinary treasures.” Douder, who is named after the stained bronze and soot of a sailing snuffer, which she calls the beloved of Farrow & BallThe blue and green smoke from Incyra, came first.
![Marmello and Sap Green samples, both from the new Farrow & Ball collection](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2Fca05127e-c6d1-49aa-86a8-5f6c78f2e481.jpg?resize=1200%2C1800&ssl=1)
![A collection of old mirrors on a wooden bathroom painted in green sap](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F95465217-db2c-46ee-b26f-e93109c30f97.jpg?resize=1200%2C1800&ssl=1)
Studholme began his career in advertising before joining F&B in 1996, initially helping with the launch of his first Fulham exhibition room, before becoming a color curator. And although he has seen many trends that come and go, lately he noticed a color revival in Interiors. “This collection is a relationship with strong colors that are easy to love, they feel like old memories,” she says. An advantage of work: can dream of all the intelligent names of the brand, and occasionally deliberately esoteric. Duster, which makes yellow tones off and wonderfully murky in stained cleaning fabric, is perhaps the most nostalgic and personal of the new colors. “It connects with a memory of the childhood of the newly washed domiciles of my mother of the house, which would sit and fold carefully,” says Studholme to grow in Surrey of the 1960s, where her strongest memory is the strongest color is the Green vinyl table of the kitchen. Her confused shadow is no different from Dibber, named by her green finger husband after the practice horticultural tool that makes holes on the floor to plant seeds. “All these colors are inspired by something close to home,” he says about what is the company’s first new line in two and a half years.
![School and its extension](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F810910ec-c085-4648-86f7-e4710749b5b8.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1)
Studholme is a firm believer that colors should harmonize with their surroundings; So obsessive is his search for the perfect Pantone that, when his children were younger, he had to promise to keep his old western london corridor of the same color so they knew they had returned to the right house. At 10, I was already painting the interior of yellow cabinets to create a feeling of surprise, then attacking his teenage bedroom in the darkest vegetables. “My mother tells me that she used to describe experiences with color,” she says. “I would call it ‘The Holiday with the Pink Sky.”
For those who seek advice on how to use color, it suggests creating tonal changes inside an interior, moving from the lighter to darker tones as you pass during the day. One of his first decorative movements after buying the house in Somerset seven years ago was to create the White School for the walls. She suggests introducing the color as unexpected details: painting the legs of a chair, a edge or a single detail in a vivid color, then accumulate in courage from there. The scarlet doors have become a firm.
![The kitchen dresser is painted in Marmello and lined with auguste paper](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F4db0b194-1c78-4e33-ac2b-9b808f573098.jpg?resize=1200%2C1800&ssl=1)
![A bedroom with walls and door painted in Savia Green](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F9e7d81ab-b297-4290-bb41-5131bb2d0173.jpg?resize=1200%2C1800&ssl=1)
She points out a huge old dishes that fills the distant wall of her kitchen. It is painted in Marmelo, a burnished orange derived from the Portuguese word for quince, which is a color that lends character and joy. The radiator cover and kitchen units are covered with reduced green, a brown tone, just there.
![The units in the pantry are painted with dibber in the Matte Flat finish](https://i0.wp.com/www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F2589aee6-8079-428a-9d4f-e03e68779b90.jpg?resize=1200%2C1799&ssl=1)
It also experiments with saturated tones in smaller and intimate spaces: its pantry, for example, is painted in Naperon, a faded terracotta and one of the new colors 2025. Or simply paints half or three quarters of the road along the wall. The rooms in the new wing of wood of his house, conceived by local architects Bindloss Dawes, are deliberately bold. “I want to give the guests a visual delight,” he says about a vintous green savia (of the 2019 line created with the Natural History Museum) and the soft sleeping space of the pink cup, with a complete accompanying bathroom with painted floors Arlequín patterns.
Occasionally, however, the correct tone is none. Studholme’s own bedroom is washed in Stirabout, an existing F&B color inspired by Irish porridge, and chosen by its absence of tone. “I wanted him to feel as if you were floating in a canopy of trees,” she says, surveying the fields and the sky beyond. “The tranquility cuts you.” Tranquility is surely a shade change that we all need.