I wrote about our renovation mood board a while back (here is our original). One goal of a mood board is to establish the color world that you want to live in. Many people go into projects with set ideas for a palette. We did not—we were looking to discover and embrace more color. A primary reason we wanted to work with Frances Merrill at Reath Design was for her daring, inimitable use of color. I mean, look at this beauty. And this one.

This turned out to be a good instinct because she showed us the importance of a paint color’s luminescence, the gravity that a deep color gives to a space, the jolt that an unexpected hue can lend to a quieter room. She unearthed my childhood love for a green kitchen (I had a great aunt who had one, and I would visit just so I could stand in the kitchen) and transformed my suspicions about reds.

For years in Brooklyn, we’d been tamping down color in our home as a way of psychically taming the chaos in our lives (2 busy jobs, 2 kids, a dog, life in NYC), but Ojai is about re-emerging and unleashing as we enter a new phase of our lives. The first two friends to visit the house described it as “happy.” The palette has a lot to do with this.

Frances doesn’t create a color palette with paint chips, rather she works the palette into a project’s mood board. I asked about her intuitive color process and she compared it to making soup: “I tend to make soup without a recipe, putting in a little of this and a little of that, while tasting to make sure it is balanced.”

I hope you enjoy our conversation (and another of my color inspirations at the end). To kick off, here’s a video of us playing mix-and-match the swatch.

Yours in room anchovies and food anchovies (read on to get the reference!),

Amanda ...