I am Wren Callahan, and this site is nine years of notes about colour, written from a north facing flat with far too many paint pots in it.
The flat is the reason for all of it. North light is flat, cool and unforgiving, and it turned every colour I chose into a slightly different colour once it was on the wall. The warm white went grey. The soft green went to something like pond water by four in the afternoon. I repainted the same bedroom five times before I stopped blaming the paint and started paying attention to the light it was sitting in.
What I actually learned
That a colour is never one colour. It is that colour under this light, next to that fabric, at this hour, and change any of the three and you have a different thing on your hands. Most colour advice skips straight past this and hands you a palette, which is why so many palettes fall apart the moment they leave the screen they were designed on.
What is on the site
Eight sections. Finding Your Palette, for working out what you already reach for. Soft Neutrals, because beige is at least nine colours. Color in Small Doses. Light and Season, which is the north facing flat talking. Mixing and Matching. Color and Feeling, for the things a colour does to a room you are living in. Flowers and Plants, since they are the cheapest colour there is. Photographing It, for the gap between what you saw and what came out of the phone.
What this is not
It is not a shop and it is not a review site. There are no star ratings, no scores, no best of anything, and no invented product cards. I write about colours and how to look at them, not about which brand’s tin to buy, because a way of seeing outlasts a paint range and because a rating implies a precision that one person’s flat does not have.
How a piece gets written
I live with the thing first. A wall colour gets a season before I write about it, because a colour you have only seen in September is a colour you do not know yet. Where a piece rests on one afternoon of looking, it says so. Where it rests on years of the same wall, it says that instead, since the two are not the same kind of evidence and should not read the same.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell me. The page gets fixed with a note saying what changed rather than being quietly rewritten. Write to hello@lifeinsoftcolors.org.