still painting the hall

Today I got a second coat of emulsion on the outer hall.  I think the estate agent's details may have optimistically described this area as an office, but you would be hard pressed to fit a desk in there.  It is a lobby about 2 metres square leading to what is effectively the back door, except that it is at the front of the house quite close to the front door.  A panel next to the back door houses the cat flap.  A glass panel and door separate the outer hall from the inner hall, which is actually quite handy for us, as by shutting the inner door we can deny cats inside the house access to the cat flap if we need to keep them in for some reason, and stop cats intent on bringing their dead rabbits into the house from getting further than the outer hall.  I'm sure the people who built the house didn't use it for that.  I don't think they even had a cat, and I have no idea what the outer hall was originally for.  I suppose that by shutting the glass door you had a slightly sound-proof space in which to make phone calls.  When we moved in it had a telephone point, but no coat pegs.

The inner hall consists of another lobby, slightly larger, and a too-narrow corridor linking the original end of the house with the 1970s extension that now contains the kitchen and the study.  The house was extended twice, and like a computer system that has had too many features added over the years, the end result is something that wouldn't look like that if you were starting again from scratch.  The inner hall is quite useful, in that there is room in it for the cat baskets and food dishes, plus a dresser where I can put my slightly random collection of pottery.  Altogether it is a lot of hall, since the downstairs sitting room has a distinctly hall-like character, and if you could aggregate their floor areas into a sensible shape they'd add up to a decent sized room.  They don't build houses like that nowadays.

I also got a first coat of emulsion on the inner hall, and had to go back to B&Q as it had become apparent that one tin wasn't going to be enough.  I was fortunate in that yesterday they had two tins of Natural Teal in stock, and today they still had the one remaining tin that I rejected yesterday because it was dented.  It rained heavily in the morning, so I didn't mind that I was now committed to at least another day and a half decorating.  In the afternoon it stopped raining and the sun came out and I did mind, slightly, though the Systems Administrator who went out to try and get on with the new deck reported that the gunnera bed had become a quagmire.

I looked up the paint company yesterday, partly because I wanted to check the name of the paint I was thinking about for the kitchen, and I was mildly curious about them.  The brand name is 1829, and I'd assumed when I bought it that it was just another line from ICI or one of the chemical giants, but the name on the tin was Craig and Rose, and they had a website.  There I discovered that I was dealing with an independent UK company.  1829 is the year they were founded, they have been independent throughout their history, with seven generations of the family involved in the business, and their red oxide paint was used for a hundred years on the Forth bridge (it isn't now.  I saw a TV report about how that has been treated with some modern low maintenance coating, and the everlasting painting project is at an end).  They have a couple of other ranges besides the 1829 one, which comes in colours to fit historic themes and buildings.  It is available by mail order, or from B&Q, not a shopping destination calculated to appeal to the aspirational chattering classes.

This prompted me to look up the Farrow and Ball website.  I have never bought or used Farrow and Ball paint, which seems to me quite fabulously expensive.  A colleague who with his garden designer partner was engaged in some property renovation was slightly horrified by her loyalty to Farrow and Ball, and expressed doubts that a pot of (basically) light brown paint could cost quite so much.  I know they have cult status among the inhabitants of Islington's muesli belt, and I have read adulatory articles about their paints in the Sunday supplements, whereas I never heard of Craig and Rose until I read their name on the side of a paint tin from B&Q.  Farrow and Ball's website doesn't have a page on the history of the company, or any Victorian photographs of Mr Farrow and Mr Ball, so I looked them up on Wikipedia.  (Where would we be without Wiki?  Granted, you must not cite it as a source in your student essays, but isn't it great for gratifying idle curiosity about things that are not a matter of life and death?).  According to Wikipedia, Farrow and Ball was started in the 1930s, lay dormant for about twenty years, and in its current form has a manufacturing history dating back to the 1980s.  It is owned by venture capitalists.

It made me realise what a potent thing marketing is.  Craig and Rose is the real deal, a Scottish  family owned firm with over 180 years of history, making nice chalky emulsion in a range of historic colours.  With a back story like that they should be the darling of every homes and interiors journalist in the country, instead of which almost nobody has heard of them.