Oh, today I'm feeling more stressed than ever. I just don't think this baby is going to be done for when we're moving. How long can we survive with neither sanitation nor kitchen? Or does it just look like it's not going to be done, is everyone just pretending to freak me out and then on July 29th they're going to be jumping out from behind doors screaming 'Surprise!" Would like to think 'twas so, but fear that is more naive than simple optimism.
Anyway they've started painting and guess what, I hate all the colours. All the colours I chose. All the colours I painstakingly painted onto large sheets of sugar paper so that no nasty surprises would be delivered in the form of colours that look surprisingly anodyne on one inch samples, whilst becoming stridently well - colourful- when painted on entire walls. Guess what! It's so fucking colourful! I hate it.
The living room is particularly terrible. It's called off white on the F and B swatch, and seemed okay, kind of grown up and murky on the sugar paper swatch. But all over the living room - which is, let's face it, large - it's absolutely disgusting, the colour of a long linen skirt I own (which I actually quite like). Okay for linen, but just vile over all the walls, like a really grim accident with a can of mushroom soup. I don't know why I didn't listen to my instincts, the room was so beautiful and ethereal in white undercoat, it was obviously the right colour. Bugger. Well it's just paint. Not so difficult to deal with.
Our bedroom is this slightly pinky white, which I fear might cause C to suffer a crisis of masculinity. Perhaps he will never again be able to get it up. My lovely friend K, here from London for the day, thinks this isn't going to be a problem, claiming that anyone who has fathered three children has nothing to prove, and citing as evidence of his inherent confidence in his masculiity the fact that he is not ashamed to wear fluffy sheepskin slippers in front of guests.
Albie's got the glorious Borrowed Light, a perfect colour that I would have happily slapped over every room in the house if not for fear of eventual banality. But it is such a lovely colour! Raphael's Lulworth Blue is a bit intense for my taste but nice, the yellow for the playroom ditto. The dining room is sultry in blue green, will probably look lovely by candlelight. They're all okay but I miss that lovely, easy white. It all looks so bloody busy now, so much like we're trying for an effect.
About Me
- Natasha
- This is the story of a hapless English woman undertaking the renovation of a large almost entirely wrecked nineteenth century house in a suburb of Paris. Difficult to say how the story will end - tragedy or comedy? Time will tell.
12 comments:
don't stress. with furniture, artwork and lighting everything looks so different. let it sit for a while, then repaint if you must
we're repainting. I don't think it is recoverable. Farrow and Ball pointing, we love you!
i agree with e, even if slightly late on the uptake (thank you, berlin hotel, for not giving your guests wireless access and thank you, good people of berlin, for keeping your networks locked. not nice. so so different in sweden!). and you can't be serious that cyril would ever question his masculinity. he did, after all, fall in love with you in the pinkest of pink flats, no?
I've quite forgotten that. did he really?
what shoes were they?
have covered it all over and it looks nice again. white. it's very restful. and it stands out against the other colours, so i think it's okay.
was thinking of flat in the sense of english apartments, i.e. 96a marquis road, aka the pink palace, not flats in the sense of ballet shoes. never be ashamed of white paint. all the same, just was in an apartment painted according to le corbusier color schemes--fantastic
What colours other than white did le Corb use? Apart from swimming pool tiles?
http://www.ribabookshops.com/site/viewtitle.asp?pid=6557
i think this might really interest you. there's also a special line of paints:
In early modernist white houses, the occasional wall was painted a primary color. In 1931, Le Corbusier developed a line of wallpaper for a company called Salubra as a means of standardizing wall colors for houses. His ''color keyboard'' of 43 wallpaper tones, as well as a second line of 20 wallpapers, developed in 1959, have now been reproduced as flat, silicon-resin mineral paints. They are made in Switzerland by kt colors; bright colors, $195 a gallon; pastels, $135; and white, $85. Available in the United States from (716) 609-9477. Shipping is extra.
p.s. http://www.flickr.com/photos/yusheng/1302412841/
We live near two wonderful houses - the Villa Savoye, le Corbusier, and an Alvar Aalto house, la maison carre, which is in a way even more amazing. you must come visit just to go to both. Every time I go to one or the other I yearn to have a mess gene transplant and to live in organised, modernist, heaven.
did mark come to berlin too?
we are all in berlin--mark, dinah, and my parents. we stayed several days in a hotel in mitte (the honigmond, did you and cyril not stay there once? or contemplate doing so?) and now are in an enormous apt. in schoeneberg. having a marvelous time. berlin is AMAZING for children. i would urge to you to come with the boys. they'd love it. my friend nina's apartment would make you throw out everything you own and then file all the rest. organization is perhaps an understatement. her apartment might be the nicest place i've ever been to. so so beautiful.
we did indeed stay there. Who gets to share their bedroom with Dinah? happy birthday by the way. would love to go to Berlin with the kids - so many places I would love to go with them to be honest. it's getting hard to choose places to go on our own. Except for the sheer expense of carting us all around the world.
hellooooooooo?
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