Colour chaos, Part Two

Before the frantic 2 weeks we’ve just had, Chris - who pulled together the plans, the furniture & finishes schedule, the whole damn lot – came for a final visit to the site. I’d call him Designer-Chris, but that makes him sound like something Grazia magazine is trying to convince you to buy. Anyhow, he came down from Glasgow to help us get some final colours in place.

As you can see, at this juncture Jeremy & Chris are having a good chinwag and looking like they are doing Something Highly Important. I also took a picture of the wheel so I can post for posterity and say that these were carefully discussed and deliberated decisions. No matter how many times we may have changed our mind.




Off Chris goes, in his urban manner, back to his sophisticated life in Glasgow, where I imagine* he sit in metropolitan café-bars drinking fashionable lagers with his hipster friends. See why we asked him to do the Continental? Exactly. To import some city-attitude into Broadgate**.

Back to the point…

And then the grey came.

The beautiful colour-pathway of subtle olive greens & browns we had chosen for the outside of the pub looked good on the sunny Friday afternoon. I liked it. Classy***. On a dreary grey Saturday morning, however, the pub seemed to actually vanish into the grey sky hanging about above Preston.

Jeremy said ‘It looks like the Bismark’.

So we painted over the bottom half in a ‘nice ivory’ (I say in a sarcastic tone), so as not to put people off coming into the joint. It is, after all, our aim to be busy.



When we came to the colours for the snug, decorator-in-chief got a sample pot and painted a couple of patches on the wall****. The colour was grey. Matt, dark, urban, chic grey. The kind of grey that would pick you up at eleven, take you to a meeting of an anarchist organisation before cocktails and dancing, and a bike ride through town at dawn. Radical grey.


Jeremy said ‘It’ll look like we’re inside a nuclear bunker’.

Actually, he had a point. He seems to have switched off his internal ‘I want to live in Berlin’ dial and repositioned it at ‘San Francisco 1969’. We have settled on a beautiful dark (greyish) turquoise for the bar, and a light (sky) blue for the walls. It’ll look amazing. And the best thing about it is it’s nearly finished!





* Actually, as he is a friend of my friend Jane, I am pretty convinced this is a fair representation. Not that I’m in any way jealous or anything.
** And also because Chris is the only person we know who designs the insides of bars & restaurants. He also gets nominated for awards for it, ‘cos he’s very good. Pretty handy really.
*** A bit like myself before 3 white wines (bottles).
**** This was probably due to his increased awareness of our decision-making processes. You could say actute perception of dithering.