Shades Of Grey

This information laden, technicolour world of ours can often be an assault on the senses. Navigating the city usually involves visual entanglements with unsightly billboards or commercial signage shouting in jarring and aggressive colours - colours so loud they make your eyes deaf. It takes a good deal of strategy and planning to get from one side of town to the other with your conception of beauty and air of tranquility intact.
At times I find myself driving as if I were following one of those childhood mazes - careful to not make a wrong turn which might spit me out onto a road so heinous that it will likely taint if not ruin my entire afternoon. Certain routes are to be avoided at all cost and if driving along these parades of ugliness is inescapable the task must be undertaken with eyes to the front, looking straight ahead. Like a pupil in class at a strict Victorian boarding school - you obey the rules to avoid being punished. If you lapse, you will be confronted with a lurid street scape of brightly coloured, homogeneous buildings decorated with text speak slogans and bilious banners - and consequently your heart will sink.
The process of visual editing can be rather exhausting and is never entirely successful. Every day there is some unexpected colour collision to contend with -  a pollution so ubiquitous that it must be tolerated. Bright and brash appears to be the universal mantra of the commercial world but it is an anathema to mine.
I find solace in more subtle hues, in the mid tones where nothing is loud and obvious - where the nuance of colour is whispered and complexity resides in the shadows. Where the parameters are not so harshly defined, where there is still room for a maybe, for imagination, for pause. Harmony is interstitial - it exists somewhere on that gently obscured island between absolutes. Grey is not black and it is not white - it is not that simple. It is subjective and subdued, refined and enduring and a most appropriate backdrop for the intimacy of home.

This French 19th century draper’s table beautifully displays all the subtlety of the colour grey  - the paint finish is original, unwaxed to preserve the delicate, velvety surface of the paint. A stunning feature side, display or sofa table or a wonderful addition to a kitchen.