Historic paints and wallpapers. (Design Notes).

Some twenty years ago Tom Helme was working with the National Trust of Great Britain as a specialist in paint restoration. Finding that exact replicas of period colors were extremely difficult to obtain, the trust suggested in the mid-1980s that Helme found a company to create paints in colors appropriate for their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century country houses. He declined because at the time he believed there was no manufacturer that could mass-produce colors to his exacting standards. He then experienced what can only be described as a serendipitous moment while working at Castle Hill in Devon. He was confounded in his attempt to mix a particularly complicated shade of deep red. In response, one of the painters at the site produced from his truck a can of flat oil paint in the perfect shade. The can bore the manufacturer's name: Farrow and Ball.

Helme was so pleased with this product that he was soon working with the company to develop a line of historic paint colors. This association eventually led him to enter into a partnership with Martin Ephson, a financier, to buy Farrow and Ball, which now has an expansive line of historic paints and wallpapers.

In the eighteenth century the word dead was used to describe a highly desirable mat paint finish that was very difficult to achieve. It was created by adding a good deal of turpentine to the paint before it was applied as the final coat. This dulled the considerable sheen of the underlying paint and smoothed out the unevenness endemic to early paint. Thus, when the painters J. and M. Gamble issued an invoice to Nathaniel Curzon, third baron of Scarsdale, in 1830 for services rendered in the library at Kedleston Hall in Derby, they listed "121 yds. Walls dead salmon col. three times." Farrow and Ball have re-created this popular eighteenth-century color, appropriately naming it Dead Salmon.

The firm's paints are available in more than one hundred shades and in a number of finishes: estate emulsion (mat finish of considerable depth), oil eggshell (middling to low sheen), water-based ...