This is why you should let someone else choose your paint colors

As advised by Emily’s paint consultant, ‘Beta White’ from Myland’s paint range The Dependables with Beta Human.

There is a special type of paralysis that sets in towards the end of renewal. The plaster is dry, the joiner has gone home, and you’re standing in an empty room clutching a fan of color charts like a lost hand of cards, utterly confused as to whose off-white is the best off-white.

I know this taste of deadlock intimately. I have lived in it. Last summer, four weeks away from giving birth, and with renovations running well behind schedule, I finally admitted (not before spending a small fortune on tester pots) that something needed to be handed over. And while I didn’t have the budget to hire an interior designer at the eleventh hour, a color consultant was well within my means.

But who to go with? Most UK paint brands now offer some form of color consultancy service. Virtual sessions sit somewhere around £95-£150 an hour, and home visits around £195-£300 an hour, depending on the brand and how senior the consultant is. Most services also cover multiple rooms in one booking rather than charging per room, and refund some fees against your paint order, so it’s worth checking before you write it off as an extra expense. Many interior designers now also offer a more low-lift consultancy service to help you workshop paint schemes – House and Garden 101 Interior Designers Adam Bray And Tamsin Saunders of Home and Found Name a couple. These sessions are slightly more expensive than a paint consultation, but will also include advice on furniture, art and fabric, so are worth considering if you have a big budget.

In this case, I gravitated to an old favorite of mine Mylandswhose paint I have used in almost every home I have lived in and whose residential consultancy service is brand new. Still a family-run business, now in its fifth generation, they have been mixing paint in London since 1884, and until they began selling to the public in 2012, were one of the design industry’s best-kept secrets, supplying paint to royalty, trade, film sets and galleries. Everything is manufactured at their South London site, and they are one of the few major paint brands that still use natural pigments, which means their colors are incredibly rich and multi-tonal. Their Marble Matte Emulsion (made from crushed Carrara marble) is one of the best paints out there. It goes on like a dream, with far less chipping over time than other brands that shall remain nameless.