The journal
Mylands: The Home of Colour
With 140 years of experience, Mylands has become an authority on style and colour. Here are our tips for getting the very most out of your home.
For 140 years, Mylands has been making paint in the heart of London. In that time, through five generations of the same family, we have become something of an authority on colour, on how it is made, and on how to use it beautifully at home. We are, in every sense, a home of colour. Here is some of what those years have taught us.
First, always look at colour in your own light. The single most common decorating regret starts with a shade that looked perfect on a small swatch and quite different on the wall. Light changes everything: the same colour behaves one way in a bright, south-facing room and another in a cooler, north-facing one, and shifts again from morning to evening. Paint a generous sample, live with it for a few days, and view it at different times before you commit. It is the surest way to end up with a colour you truly love.
Second, think about your home as a whole, not one room at a time. The most satisfying interiors have a sense of flow, where each space relates to the next through a considered family of colours. You do not need to paint everything the same, far from it, but choosing shades that share an undertone or a mood lets rooms feel individual yet connected, especially where you can see from one into another.
Third, do not be afraid of deep, enveloping colour in the right room. There is a lasting fashion for keeping everything pale, but a snug, a dining room or a bedroom can be transformed by a rich, cocooning shade that wraps around you. Used with confidence, and paired with warm lighting, dark colours feel intimate and luxurious rather than small.
Fourth, remember that the details finish the scheme. Woodwork, doors, radiators and ceilings are all opportunities: paint them to blend for a calm, seamless look, or to contrast for definition and character. And whatever you choose, a richly pigmented, hard-wearing paint will not only look better, with more depth and truer colour, it will also last longer and wear more gracefully.
Above all, colour is personal. Our role, after 140 years of perfecting it, is simply to give you the finest colours we can, and to help you use them to make the very most of your home.
