Pigment Hall specifies and mixes colour for period interiors across the Orsett valley. Limewash, eggshell on panelling, hand-painted kitchens and water gilding, for eleven interior designers and about forty houses a year.
Booking six to eight weeks ahead. The $450 comes off any job over $6,000, which is most of them.
Since 2009
Seventeen years, one valley, four of us
41 listed interiors
Consent applications supported since 2011
$2m cover
Public liability. Lic. #000000 (sample)
6 to 8 weeks
How far ahead we are booking today
I trained as a picture restorer and came to decorating sideways, through varnish and pigment rather than up a ladder. That is why the consultation is charged for separately. It is the part that takes the knowledge, and it is the part that stops you paying to have a room done twice.
The painting afterwards is craft, and the four of us are good at it. But a hand-brushed kitchen in the wrong green is still a kitchen in the wrong green, and no amount of cutting in saves it.
Verity Ambrell, Pigment Hall, since 2009
Square metre rates cover walls in sound condition. Preparation is quoted separately and itemised line by line, because preparation is where a cheap quote hides.
From $58 a square metre
Three coats on lime plaster, bare brick or a clay base coat. It has to breathe, so it goes nowhere near a gypsum skim unless we stabilise the wall first and say so in the quote.
From $34 a square metre
Two percent sheen, three coats, brushed out rather than rolled. There is no angle you can stand at where a dead flat wall shines back at you, which is the entire point of it.
From $46 a square metre
Hand-brushed, two coats over a bonding primer, cut back with 320 grit between them. No spray, and no roller stipple left sitting in the fielding of a panel.
From $5,400
A twelve-door kitchen, nine working days, four coats on every face including the backs of the doors. Doors come off and go on trestles, in your garage or ours.
From $180 a linear metre
23.5 carat loose leaf on cornice, picture rail and overmantel frames, laid on red bole and burnished with an agate. Oil gilding instead where the room is damp.
From $390 a door
Dragged in oil glaze over an eggshell ground, the way a Victorian grainer did it, then two coats of flatting varnish on anything that gets a hand on it daily.
Everything above is priced with our own materials. If a designer specifies a paint we do not hold, we buy it at cost and add nothing to it.
This is the first twenty minutes of a consultation, done on your phone. Every colour below is one we mix ourselves, and the note under each one is what Verity would say standing in the room with you.
Sixteen wall colours sit behind this panel, one for each period and aspect. All of them are mixed by hand on Quillon Street, two litres at a time.
Walls
Ground to match the parlour scheme at 9 Quillon Street. North light holds the violet steady, so a colour this dark reads rich rather than muddy, even at dusk.
Woodwork
A yellowed off-white, so the woodwork does not cut the wall in half the way a modern brilliant white does. In north light it stays flat and even all day, which is the whole job of an off-white.
One accent, used small
Deep violet on the back wall of a bookcase, where it is only ever seen in half light behind objects. North light holds violet honestly, without the pink that ruins it in a sunnier room.
A drawing room is looked at from a chair, from six feet, for hours at a time. Dead flat holds no sheen at all, so the colour is the only thing in the room doing any work.
Victorian plaster is usually sound but rarely flat. We fill and rub the whole wall before the first coat, which is two days you will never see afterwards.
What we would not put in this room: a cold grey, or any white with blue in it. North light is already supplying the cold.
We paint these at A2 in the real finish and leave them on your wall for a week before anyone commits.
On a listed interior nothing is masked and nothing is sprayed. Every edge in the room is cut in by hand, which is slower and is the reason it is allowed at all.
Listed building consent covers decoration more often than people expect, and an application that arrives with the paint questions already answered goes through in weeks rather than months. This is the pack we send with it.
We cut back through the layers somewhere nobody looks, usually behind a shutter, and photograph the section at forty times. On a Georgian house that is often eight schemes deep, and the third one down is frequently the good one.
Product data and vapour resistance figures for each coat in the build-up, handed over as one document. Nobody has to take our word for what is going on the wall.
A2 boards in the real finish, fixed to the wall rather than propped against it, and looked at in February light as well as in June. Two weeks is long enough to stop most mistakes.
We write the decoration section of the application and answer the conservation officer directly. There is no charge for it if we are the ones doing the work.
No vinyl emulsion, no acrylic eggshell and no silicone on a wall built before 1919. If a specification asks for them we put our objection in writing before the first day on site.
Trade terms are 15 percent. Quotes come back inside four working days in your own schedule format, and you get Wilfred Marchant’s mobile number rather than an office line.
Cawley Bridge
Kitchens and fitted joinery. Nine kitchens together since 2019, and they have stopped asking for a sample door.
Selborne
Whole-house schemes. They send a palette, we mix to it, and their clients never see a paint chart.
Ormesby
Gilding, dragged doors, and anything with a glaze in it that the trade has largely forgotten how to do.
Netherby
Listed buildings, and all the paperwork that arrives with them.
Forty miles from Quillon Street costs you nothing extra. Past that we quote accommodation for the crew, because four hours of driving a day comes out of your wall time.
Prices are what these clients paid, materials and preparation included. Sample projects, shown for illustration.
$6,900Eleven days on site
$14,200Four weeks
$9,600Three weeks
$3,850Six days
We have had four decorators through this house. Verity is the only one who asked which way the room faced before she asked what colour we liked.
Nerys Gadsby
Selborne
They quote in our own schedule format, it comes back in four days, and Wilfred answers his phone on a Saturday. That is most of the reason they get our work.
Alaric Maundrell
Maundrell & Co
The sample boards stayed on our wall for nine days and we changed our minds twice in that time. Nobody sighed.
Edmund Braithwaite
Calverley
Sample reviews, written for this concept site.
We come at the hour that matters for the room, which for a west-facing drawing room means four in the afternoon and not ten in the morning. We record the aspect, the plaster, the floor, the furniture that is staying, and we photograph all of it.
Colours named, mixed, and painted onto A2 boards in the finish they will actually be in. The boards are fixed to your wall and left there for a week. You get a written schedule with the finish, the colour and the number of coats for every surface in the house.
A priced schedule, room by room. The $450 comes off any job over $6,000, so on most houses the consultation costs nothing in the end. We are booking six to eight weeks out.
Yes. The consultation is $450 and the specification pack is another $180. It names every colour, the finish for every surface, the primer and the number of coats. We have no interest in holding it hostage, and about one in six clients does exactly this.
Usually. We take a scrape, cut it back to the layer you want, and mix against it in north light at the workshop. Two days, $60, and you leave with a litre of it.
If you followed the boards and the colour we specified is genuinely wrong in the room, we repaint that room in a new colour at our own cost, once. It has happened three times since 2009 and we would rather tell you that than pretend it never does.
For about a fortnight, slightly, on the darker colours. After that it has carbonated and it does not. In a hall or a child’s room we burnish it and put a matt soap finish over the top, which adds $9 a square metre.
Forty miles from the workshop at no extra cost. Beyond that we quote accommodation for the crew, because four hours of driving a day comes out of your wall time and we would rather say so before you sign anything.
Four. Verity, Wilfred, and two decorators who have been here nine years and four years. A kitchen gets two of us for nine days, a whole house gets three. Nothing is subcontracted, which is also why we are booked eight weeks out.
Two hours in your house, at the hour the light matters. Verity replies with two possible dates, usually the same week. Nothing is charged until we have been and seen the rooms.