The journal
Mylands Brings Colour to the British Museum
Behind the scenes: Mylands is proud to help dress the British Museum, where our colour forms the backdrop to some of the world's most treasured objects.
There are few more demanding, or more rewarding, places to see colour at work than in the galleries of a great museum. So it is with real pride that we can say Mylands paint has been chosen to help dress the British Museum, one of the world's most visited and most loved cultural institutions, and a neighbour, in a sense, of our own London home.
Exhibition and gallery spaces ask a great deal of a paint. Colour has to read absolutely true and rich under carefully controlled lighting, and it must sit quietly behind priceless objects, giving them depth and presence without ever competing for attention. The wrong colour flattens a room and distracts the eye; the right one makes everything in front of it sing. This is precisely where our richly pigmented, natural-earth colours come into their own, holding their depth and character under gallery conditions where lesser paints would look thin or lifeless.
It is also where our colour-matching craft matters most. Much of what we do for cultural and heritage projects is bespoke: our master colourmen mix shades to exact specifications, by eye, so that each space has precisely the tone its curators intend. It is a way of working we have refined over more than a century of supplying galleries, historic houses and cultural institutions, and it is why we are trusted with settings where colour is never an afterthought.
There is a lovely resonance, too, in a London paint maker helping to dress one of London's, and the world's, great museums. We have made our colours in the capital since 1884, and to play even a quiet part in the cultural life of the city means a great deal to us.
So the next time you wander through a beautifully presented gallery and feel, without quite knowing why, that the objects before you look their absolute best, spare a thought for the walls. The colour behind them is doing careful, considered work, and there is a fair chance it was mixed by hand in a London paint factory with well over a century of craft behind it.
