Choosing colour: how we build a palette for a commission

Clients rarely arrive with a colour scheme. They arrive with a feeling — "calm but not cold" — or a photograph of a room, or once, memorably, a pebble. Turning that into an actual stack of glass sheets is the part of the job that looks like magic and is really just method.

Start from the light, not the wall

The first question is never "what colours do you like?" It's "which way does the window face?" A north-facing Edinburgh room gets steady, cool light all day; glass in that room can carry saturated colour without shouting. A west-facing room gets a daily dose of amber that will set fire to any red or orange in the piece at 6pm. Same glass, different room, completely different result. We always ask for photos of the space at two or three times of day before proposing anything.

The three-colour rule

Nearly every piece that leaves this studio is built on three colours: a dominant, a support, and an accent that earns its place by being scarce. Beginners (and, honestly, plenty of professionals) get into trouble by treating glass like paint and using eight colours because the offcut trolley is right there. Glass is already doing texture, transparency and depth — restraint in hue is what stops a piece becoming noise.

Testing against the real thing

Words like "sage" and "teal" are dangerously elastic, so we don't rely on them. For matching work we fire test tiles and post them to the client to hold against the sofa, the tiles, the curtains. Colour in transmitted light behaves nothing like colour on a screen, and a tile in the hand settles a decision faster than any number of emails.

The palette conversation usually takes two weeks, start to finish. It's the least visible part of a commission and the most important: get the palette right and the design almost draws itself.