The Monday Dispatch — October 19: Green Gets Lighter

What’s New

Colour ran through almost everything on our desk this week. Not the deep, enveloping shades of the last few years, but colour used with more confidence and a lighter hand: a softer green, a single blue carried through a whole room, a stair painted yellow because the owners wanted it.

Sherwin-Williams names Celery its 2027 colour

Sherwin-Williams has chosen Celery (SW 6421), a soft yellow-green with a little warmth in it, as its colour of the year, and Minwax paired it with Pickled Oak as the matching wood finish. After several years of olive, forest and moody sage, green is staying but getting lighter. We would not paint a whole living room in it. We would use it where a family passes through every day: a mudroom, a back hall, the inside of a pantry, next to white oak with a pale wash. Read it on Design Milk

Hand-painted porcelain for the powder room

Kohler and Aerin Lauder have released Fleurette, a toilet, pedestal sink and rectangular basin decorated by hand with Delft-style florals in blue or soft green. A powder room is the one room where most clients will accept pattern on a fixture, because it is small and rarely the place you spend the evening. Let the sink carry the room and keep everything around it quiet: plaster walls and plain brass. Read it on Design Milk

A brownstone that chose colour over restraint

Barker Architecture Office renovated a four-storey Clinton Hill brownstone with a terracotta vestibule, a yellow stair with a red runner and a kitchen in white oak, honed soapstone and a lilac-veined marble backsplash. The kitchen is the useful part for a renovation here. Quiet cabinetry and a hard-working counter earn you one surprising stone, and a coloured vein is a risk that still reads as natural material. Read it on Design Milk

A Toronto dining room in denim blue

Odami finished Shinji, a steakhouse on Bay Street, in dark blue limewash, blue acoustic baffles and banquettes in the same shade, warmed with local ash and pale stone. One colour carried across the walls, ceiling and upholstery reads as calm rather than loud. The idea transfers well to a lower-level media room, where a limewash finish also forgives the uneven drywall that flat paint tends to show. Read it on Design Milk

One spotlight, one soft glow

Coil + Drift introduced two lighting collections: Touch, pivoting spotlights in brass and steel, and Strut, timber frames with long linen shades based on fire lookout towers. Side by side they make the argument we make on every lighting plan. Recessed lights handle the task; a lamp at eye level makes the room liveable in the evening. Linen shades are returning because they soften the light that LED sources give off. Read it on Design Milk

Canadian makers in Vancouver

Azure’s twelve picks from IDS Vancouver and the Design Vancouver festival include lamps made from salvaged glass block, a console built from stacked terracotta cones, Hinterland’s Shepherd’s Chair in ash or walnut with a leather seat, and a hand-tufted wool rug from Marrimor. Canadian makers are a practical sourcing option for our projects: shorter lead times, no border delays, and a piece with a story the owners can tell. Read it on Azure

What We Picked

If you are weighing colour for a kitchen or a mudroom this winter, start with the wood and the stone, then choose the paint that sits quietly beside them. You can see the sage kitchen at Lowther, the oak millwork at Sixth Lane, or read about our kitchen design work in Oakville.