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It all started in Dorset, back in 1946, with local pioneers John Farrow and Richard Ball. Farrow was a trained chemist who worked for Ireland’s Agnew Paints during the Second World War, while Ball was an engineer who survived capture as a prisoner of war.
- The One That Came Together in Seconds
- The One That Caused Some Disagreement
- The One with Notoriety
- The One with The Heritage Backing
- The One That Was A Real Head-Scratcher
- The One with A Not-So-Macabre Origin Story
- The One That’S A Travel Memento
- The One That’S Intentionally Tricky
“Right when the mania of grayswas just beginning, I went fishing with my mother-in-law. She had a lead weight at the end of her rod that was the exact color I knew we needed to make—I asked her what that thing was called, and she said, ‘It’s a plummet.’ We had both color and name done in 10 seconds.”
“There’s a color in the last set I did that I very much wanted to call ‘workwear,’ because it had been inspired by the denim of the hipsters in East London. In the end, we called it De Nimes: The word denim is bastardized from sergé de Nîmes, the fabric from the city of Nîmes that the material came from. I had it in my head that it was this gritty ...
“Dead Salmon has a terrible connotation, but it’s derived from an old painter’s invoice that the team found at a historic hall in England. It’s from 1805. Salmon is the color, and deadrefers to the matte paint finish; it has nothing to do with the fish being dead, but put together, it’s amusing.”
“Possibly the most revered Farrow & Ball paint is called Elephant’s Breath. It was named by John Fowler, probably the greatest colorist of his generation, about 50 years ago. Very often we think about complementary names for two hues that match—for example, Stringand Cordwill always work well together chromatically, and they’re both things you can ...
“In my head, I had it as the pink you’d find on an old kitchen dresser from the 1920s, but when I showed it to our head of creative, she said, ‘Oh, it’s a sort of boudoir color.’ However, ‘boudoir pink’ is definitely not a Farrow & Ball name, so we tossed it around for quite some time, finally looking into why a boudoir was called a boudoir. It’s f...
“It’s a bit grim sounding, isn’t it? But it’s just making reference to the pigment that was historically used in green wallpapers. Though there is a theory that Napoleon may have been poisoned by the decoration in his bathroom, when he was in exile.”
“Inspiration for that came to me in 1990. My husband and I were in India, and we got caught up in the Hindu festival of Holi, where people exuberantly throw different-colored powders around. At the end of the day, when we got back to the youth hostel we were staying in, he was covered head to toe in various colors. It really stuck in my mind. Rangw...
“I like to make names that are difficult to say or have an intrigue to them, like Inchyra Blue, because it sticks in people’s minds. For example, Stiffkey Blue: Everyone pronounces it ‘stiff key,’ but it’s actually ‘stew key.’ It’s titled after a beach in Norfolk that I took my children to when they were little.” See more paint stories:7 Hotel Desi...
- Elly Leavitt
Farrow & Ball is a British manufacturer of paints and wallpapers largely based upon historic colour palettes and archives. The company is particularly well known for the unusual names of its products.
Ronan Farrow: 'I Was Raised With An Extraordinary Sense Of Public Service' The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist talks about growing up the son of famous parents, investigating the allegations...
Apr 23, 2018 · Farrow & Ball kindly explained that this was called Surfactant Leaching (sounds like a disease doesn’t it?). Surfactants (an ingredient that is used to stabilize paints liquid form) usually evaporate readily from the paint film when the drying conditions are good or they are locked into the paint film.
Sep 24, 2021 · Famous for its outlandish shade names (“Rangwali,” “Elephant’s Breath” and “Dead Salmon” among the most hauntingly eccentric) and lavish price tags, Farrow & Ball is ripe for parody ...
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Feb 24, 2023 · The highly successful premium paint and wallpaper company Farrow & Ball have been transforming interiors since 1964. With a cult following you may know them for their quirky paint names such as Elephant's Breath, Mole’s Back and Dead Salmon.
