How did you first become interested in the history  of color? 

Colors were a big part of my childhood. My mother was a florist and very creative, I used to go to her shop after school and make up little posies to be “sold” alongside the proper bouquets. Later I studied history in Bristol and Oxford, to research 18th-century style, in particular at masquerade balls. Color, of course, came up again and again. Fashionable shades were changing month  to month, and the names were often wonderful and completely unfamiliar to me, so of course I’d have to go away and try to look them up. Colors have been a quiet obsession ever since. 

How does color impact the way we work and live?

Color has the power to heighten our emotions and our experience of life. We’re so lucky to live at a time when colors are democratic. Most medieval Europeans, for example, would never have had the opportunity to  wear or own objects in certain shades, like scarlet or rich purple, either because of the cost or because  there were laws prohibiting it. Today, we can create spaces filled with hues that elevate our mood and energize us. There is something pretty magical  
about that.

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