Living with Colour: The Modern House and Farrow & Ball meet design journalist Tom Morris in his Barbican flat
Our film series ‘Living with Colour’ with premium paint manufacturer Farrow & Ball concludes with a visit to design journalist and consultant Tom Morris’ flat in the Barbican Estate. You can watch the film here.
Tom lives in a one-bedroom, top-floor flat in the Barbican, overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral and the architectural smorgasbord that is the City of London. We previously visited Tom for our ‘My Modern House’ series, when he told us that he favours ‘earthy, moody colours and natural materials to counteract all the glass and steel outside.’
Having changed the colour of his main living space since then, from a muted-terracotta to Farrow & Ball’s ‘Salon Drab’, Tom elaborated that, ‘Living so centrally, I’m surrounded by glass and by concrete and by metal and I felt it necessary to bring some nature inside, which led me to bring in more earthy colours.’
The shade lacks brightness but, as such, works as a ‘dark neutral’ that quietly backdrops Tom’s eclectic interior style, in which self-made ceramics, vintage furniture and finds from travels to places like Japan, Burma and India sit harmoniously against the scheme.
Darker palettes can be hard to incorporate but, owing to the superlative design of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon – the original architects of the Barbican Estate – light pours in via a generous amount of glazing in the flat, meaning it ‘has an amazing capacity to really handle anything you throw at it,’ says Tom.
Contrasting with this are the kitchen and bathroom, where Tom opted for blue shades of ‘De Nimes’ and ‘Stone Blue’ respectively to add concentrated moments of more vivid colour in the smaller-scale spaces.
Contrary to the idea that Brutalist or Modernist homes have to be white-box, stark spaces, Tom explains how the intention at the Barbican was that each flat would become ‘something of a machine for living.’ Tom’s eclectic aesthetic sensibility and tailored colour scheme certainly realise this, evidencing his own belief that ‘homes should evolve with you,’ and contribute to, ‘the colourful fabric of life’.
Our ‘Living with Colour’ series has taken us into a broad range of well-designed living spaces, from a neutrally-decorated Victorian cottage to an open-plan school conversion with a bold palette and a Grade II-listed country home with a contemporary intervention. Watch the other films here.
To celebrate our collaboration with Farrow & Ball, we’re offering you a rare chance to win our moving-in box, a design-led welcome gift of bespoke objects we normally only give to people who have bought a home through our agency. Also included in the prize is ten litres of Farrow & Ball paint in a colour of the winner’s choice. Click here to enter. Good luck!
Watch Tom’s film here.
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