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About
'Colour makes people happy' was founded by Simon March.
It evolved as he saw that there may be a place for a paint shop that was dedicated to colour and only colour. It seemed that all the places to buy paint were hardware stores. Simon thought there should be a place where people could get advice and choose colours in an environment that was more conducive to making informed decisions about their home. Not a place where the guy behind the counter is smoking a roll up and holding a bacon butty or a stuffy interiors store that makes you feel slightly intimidated. (This was before there was a famous 'heritage brand' on every street).
When visiting the many paint and DIY stores and choosing colours for customers, he couldn't bear to see yet another colour name evoking the past with some spurious bullshit about Napoleons pantry... or Marie Antoinette's boudoir... then finally having to quote a colour name that sounded like sugary deserts, or a description of a mawkish sunset, names that stuck sickly in the throat.
Being quite a contrarian, he wanted to resist the dictatorial force-feeding of paint companies extolling the virtues and questionable taste of the gaudy Victorians and Edwardians - and, god forbid, the louche 'Romans'.
Do we all live in stately homes, Citadels and pavilions with drawing rooms or loggias overlooking olive groves? No, we don't.
He wanted to help make colour decisions for customers based on the colours they like, for the reasons they like them, not on what they're conditioned to believe 'goes'. Whatever that means... stuffy conventions.
Mainly he dislikes the wheeling out of the words 'heritage colours', 'historical' and worst of all 'traditional'; not so much for what they mean inherently but for their cynical used meaningless use to evoke a romantic, long gone epoch.
It's a lazy marketing technique.
If we want to live in houses with central heating, electric lights and plasma screens, why would we want a colour Samuel Pepys' may or may not have had in his pantry or Caligula's had in his Roman toilet. Why would it matter to me that Winston Churchill had a blue wheelbarrow?
We don't need anyone to tell us that 'this is a definite light blue'.
I know what I see and I'll describe it the way I want.
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