Colour Story: Jenna Lyons' Soho Loft

This week’s colour story is an homage to Jenna Lyons: I have long been a fan of her style, both personal and interior design. 

Jenna Lyons = playful, confident, feminine, unapologetic.

Her Soho loft is a great colour case study.  Shot here for Vogue Living, with a final image from the Meyer Davis website.

It’s a triadic colour scheme of:

Masses of blue 

A lot of pink

A touch of green

…with an honourable mention for the gilt and brass notes that bring glamour and sparkle, along with yellow warmth.  

What’s clever here? Well, what isn’t! 

But a couple of comments on this.  

COMMENT ONE: there is an inverse relationship between quantity of colour and darkness (value) of colour. The greatest quantity is the lightest colour (blue), mid-range quantity = middling lightness (all that sumptuous rose pink cotton velvet).  And the minimal touches of accent colour (green) are much darker, creating an increasingly powerful visual impact as quantities reduce.  Thus, the whole thing hangs in balance.  

Big things are weaker, small things are more powerful.  

COMMENT TWO: is that in this triadic scheme (three colours, roughly equidistant on the colour wheel) a balance between playfulness (richly pigmented, strong and bold colour) and sophistication (knocked back and muted colour) is achieved by selecting a palette of equal chromaticness, both the green and the pink are 50% chromatic. Enough pigment still to make a statement, but not so loud as to become tiring to live with.

Off topic, I dropped in a final image of the loft because I admire the disregard of grids and rules, for example the placement of a pair of wall lights - located as twins, off-centre - and the out of line art.  Elsewhere self-coloured panelling is similarly ignored and art is whimsically dotted here and there (as you see in image 1).  

I made a valiant effort to find a paint reference for the walls…and failed.  So I’m guessing at something like F&B Borrowed Light 

I used my beloved (but it has to be noted, very expensive) NCS Colour Atlas to work out the scheme. 

Click on photos to link through to original materials and websites.