Founded by Jean Frédéric Nothomb, Argile is a French industrial manufacturer of high-quality decorative paint, and has specialised in premium design projects for over 15 years. Argile is incorporated into projects internationally — residential, commercial, heritage, hotels, museums, scenography, boutiques and luxury. Their motto is ‘Nature doesn’t make mistakes.’

Founded in 1970 by Guy Taillieu, Orac was launched with the vision of becoming the world’s most innovative manufacturer of architectural decorative ornaments for simple, unique ways of giving walls extra dimension and personality. Successful global expansion has meant that Orac will keep on creating beautiful, innovative interior concepts, with a focus on 100% sustainable entrepreneurship.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

This project was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate bolder, stronger forms and colours on products that usually present in soft variations and combinations. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on my approach, and push my boundaries, to prove that my method is a successful process, no matter what colour I start with. The accentuated shadows and highlights presented on the three-dimensional Orac mouldings undeniably demonstrated my approach.

It was important to cater for a variety of colour — so I ensured that my examples offered calmer examples. However, it became clear early on in my planning that the more creative the form, the more adventurous I could be with colour pairings. Each moulding was carefully painted by hand, leaving beautiful brush strokes that added a sense of history and an artisanal feel. I wondered whether this was something that would be lost with spray-painted finishes, and whether this enhanced the relationship between heritage and innovation.

With my palettes completed, I set about experimenting with a common interior design approach: starting with pattern first. Here, I randomly introduced wallpapers and fabrics that co-ordinated well with the palettes for their ability to lean into the colour-ways through association of hue and chroma, rather than by an exact colour matching process.

To demonstrate my methods, I hand-mixed one Argile colour — Terre du Vaucluse — with black, white and grey to produce six colours that show the linear nature of colour shades. Then, I introduced another six Argile colours for shadow and highlight to show the transition from one hue to another, and how ‘rounded’ the colour experience could be — something I had previously documented and researched in Italy with Argile colours against trompe l’œil façades.