You can tell a lot about a property from just a thumbnail. Ruth Mottershead was casually browsing RightMove from her modern home in Hale Barns, Greater Manchester, when she stumbled on a detached, redbrick Victorian house in the nearby village of Hale, and instinctively had to go and view it. “When we walked in, we knew it was probably the one for us,” she recalls. It was rich in original features and character, but was decorated in neutral shades. “We felt like we needed to inject a bit of colour,” she says.
As the creative and marketing director of both Little Greene, the paint company her father David Mottershead founded in 1996, and the interior designers’ go-to brand, Paint & Paper Library, Mottershead lives and breathes colour. Add to the equation her husband, James Watson, a fourth-generation wallpaper manufacturing specialist and founder of 1838 Wallcoverings, and you get a pair of fearless, serial decorators.
They got the keys to the house almost two years ago, and live there with their daughter Ivy, aged three, and their two cockapoos, Bonnie and Mabel. While they are taking time to consider what structural works they might undertake, no surface has been left blank. “We wanted to put some history back into the house in terms of how it was decorated,” says Mottershead. It dates back to the 1870s, and the wallpaper collaborations that Watson has worked on with the Victoria & Albert Museum have provided a wealth of decorative papers to mine.
“I think the biggest problem for most people is that they find it hard to choose paints and wallpapers. But for us, it’s deciding exactly what we want, because there are so many options, and we want to use what we’ve created,” muses Mottershead. While the five-bedroom house is still a work in progress in terms of furniture and window treatments, the walls and ceilings are an evolving expression of the couple’s creativity. “Sometimes the decorator’s booked and we don’t even know which room we’re doing,” laughs Watson. Here, the pair share their top tips, as well as the choices that didn’t quite work out.
Use colours to create a mood
The south-facing playroom/dining room off the kitchen is what Mottershead calls “the hub of the home”. “It’s an active space – it’s energising and full of life,” she says, which is why the couple opted for a feature wall swathed in 1838’s graphic Peacock Topiary wallpaper. The remaining walls and ceiling are drenched in Little Greene’s Etruria, a mid-strength blue with warm tones, offset with a statement wall of joinery in the brand’s vibrant Yellow Pink. It’s a playful combination; Ruth muses how pairing the wallpaper with a soft white would have changed the atmosphere entirely: “It would probably look a little more sophisticated.”
The space is a marked contrast from the couple’s office, which feels far more serene. “For a home office, I always specify colours that bring calmness and aren’t too much of a distraction for when you’re working, because you just want to focus and concentrate,” says Mottershead. Little Greene’s Light Peachblossom, a dusky pink, exudes serenity on the ceiling and bookshelves, with Rolling Fog, a warm beige, covering the walls. And now for the science part: “We chose a muted pink; because this room is north-facing and has a blue light, it’s got a little bit of a purply undertone to it. The two colours work harmoniously and really nicely together,” explains Mottershead.
Have fun with transitional spaces
“Because you’re not spending a lot of time in them, you can really afford to be a bit louder,” says Mottershead of being bold with decor in hallways, loos and utility rooms. She practises what she preaches: her home’s cloakroom (which doubles as the dogs’ sleeping quarters) is wrapped in Little Greene’s Burges Snails, a charming daisy and snail-print wallpaper designed with the National Trust. She teamed it with an earthy, putty colour, Portland Stone, on the woodwork, which happens to be Little Greene’s best-selling paint shade: “It works well with green because it’s got some green pigment in it,” she notes.
The hallway and staircase are just as impactful, with pale blue-green walls in Aquamarine grounded by dark-green Ambleside on the original wood panelling on the lower parts of the walls. “Aquamarine is a really hard colour to use,” admits Mottershead, “but it works well in this particular space because it’s a cold green – I wouldn’t necessarily use it in another room in this house.” The finishes are equally considered, with Intelligent Matt on the walls, and Intelligent Eggshell providing a wipeable, low-sheen finish on the panelling to protect it from knocks and bumps. “You don’t actually find that much gloss used on woodwork now, it’s more likely to be eggshells or satins, which are really hard-wearing,” says Mottershead.
Don’t forget the fifth wall
“The reason people pick white for ceilings is because it’s the cheapest paint that can be bought,” laments Mottershead, adding: “I like painting the ceilings here to bring the height of the room down, and to give the ceiling the attention it deserves.” In her former new-build home, the low ceilings weren’t a feature worth highlighting, but in the large sitting room here, she wanted to draw the eye upwards. Using the stained-glass window panels as a starting point, she chose the rich yellow Pollen II from Paint & Paper Library.
“Normally in a south-facing room I say don’t go for too many yellowy or orangey colours because it’ll be really impactful,” she advises, “but we actually wanted to create that effect here.” Choosing the right neutral for the walls was then key: “Had we used a blue-white or a brilliant white, it would be uncomfortable because it would feel too clinical against the yellow from the ceiling,” she explains. Cashmere V on the walls and Cashmere III on the woodwork, also by Paint & Paper Library, are off-whites with just the right balance of yellow undertones.
In the bedrooms with wallpaper, the uneven ceilings have been left white – for now.
Create cohesion around the house
A yellow ceiling, a pink office, a green hallway… if it all sounds disparate, then know that there is method to Mottershead’s schemes. “We’ve handled each space individually, while trying to create a transition from room to room,” she says. A case in point is a kitchen wall painted in a muted green called Windmill Lane, which recalls the sage green in the adjoining dining room’s peacock wallpaper. The rest of the kitchen is a stopgap job, and the cabinetry and tiles have been drenched in a plastery pink, China Clay Deep, which was also picked out of the same wallpaper. “You come out of one room into another, and although it’s quite different, it feels like a smooth passage,” says Mottershead.
If in doubt, go with green
After visiting the Mottershead-Watson abode, friends always leave feeling inspired to try something punchier than grey. “Questions about colour are what I get asked the most,” says Mottershead. While picking the ‘right’ colour is entirely subjective to the space and property, she always comes back to green. “I adore green. You can use it in lots of different spaces and areas as there are so many tones of it, whereas other colours are more appropriate for certain spaces. Overall it’s quite neutral: you can obviously get blue-greens or pinky-greens, but they’re not so off the scale that it’s creating too much cold or too much warmth in a room – it’s right in the middle.” Her most versatile pick is Little Greene’s Livid: “It’s bold, but its muted tone creates restfulness and tranquillity.”
Use wallpaper and woodwork in harmony
Having been immersed in the world of wallpaper from a young age, Watson is obviously biased: “It’s fashion for your walls. I think it brings creativity – no disrespect to paint,” he caveats. Demand for nature-inspired designs boomed during the pandemic: “We saw that people were buying more bird and floral wallpapers, especially designs with green colours, as they evoke a sense of relaxation and calm,” says Mottershead.
The couple’s tranquil bedroom is covered in 1838’s Macaw, a busy, pastel bird motif designed in 1908 by the illustrator Walter Crane. Mottershead’s trick is to pull out complementary colours for the window frames (in this case, a powder pink called Masquerade) and skirting boards (Green Stone, a muted grey-green) to make the decor more immersive. A similar formula has been applied in a guest bedroom, where Little Greene’s parrot-motif Great Ormond Street wallpaper has been teamed with two complementary shades of blue on the skirting boards and window frames.
Be prepared to pivot
The only spot of grey to be found in this house is on Ivy’s bedroom window frames. She was a toddler when they moved, so Mottershead and Watson chose to repeat the same vibrant jungle mural by Sian Zeng that she had had in her bedroom in their former home, to aid in the transition for her. “I absolutely loved that wallpaper, and it brought some familiarity,” says Mottershead.
But there are other rooms which haven’t been so successful and are already enjoying a second life. In the basement, the wallpaper the couple originally chose for a guest room has been replaced – “It was lovely, but felt too heavy,” says Mottershead – by a delicate floral motif with a neutral background, which helped to lift the mood.
Elsewhere, the office was originally covered in pattern, but Mottershead found she “couldn’t live with it. It was a challenging design I’d worked on, and ultimately I couldn’t look at it every day. It wasn’t capturing the mood we wanted to create.” Yet, rather than dwelling on these decisions as mistakes, the couple use the opportunity to try something new instead. It’s reassuring to know that even the experts don’t always get it right first time – and that a print or paint mishap can be easily rectified with a slick of something new.
1838wallcoverings.com; littlegreene.com
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