Farrow & Ball

Overview

Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2021

Farrow & Ball started in 1946 as the project of two Dorset chemists, John Farrow and Richard Ball, who built their first factory in Verwood and spent years supplying paint to Ford, Raleigh Bicycles, and the British Admiralty long before their colors became a reason of their own. As the industry moved to cheaper acrylics in the '70s and '80s, Farrow & Ball kept its pigment-heavy recipes, and that commitment became its signature. Everything is still mixed in Dorset, the same region where it all started.

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The Partnership

Color is central to how Wearstler works. It is the first tool she reaches for when a room needs a mood. Farrow & Ball had already been part of that toolkit for more than twenty years before the two ever formally partnered, so the collaboration felt like a natural next step. She had been specifying these pigments and living with these colors on other people's walls long before she mixed one of her own. When Farrow & Ball chose its first outside designer in company history, they already knew her work well.

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The California Collection

Eight colors, each one drawn from something specific in the California landscape: Tar for sun-baked desert highway asphalt, Sand for Malibu's beaches, Citrona for the state's lemon trees, Palm for the palms lining the LA skyline. Salt takes its crispness from Pacific sea spray, Hazy from the marine fog that rolls in some mornings, Stoke from an overcast coastal sky, and Faded Terracotta from pots and tiles softened by years of sun. Every one is a specific hour of California weather, bottled.