A Little Red Goes a Long Way

On small decorating decisions with disproportionate consequences.

Red has terrible manners. It walks into a room full of tasteful neutrals and immediately becomes the person everyone remembers.

The sofa has been there for eight years. The curtains required samples, measurements and a brief marital disagreement. But put a red bowl on the table and suddenly that’s what people mention.

Infuriating, really. Also useful.

Because sometimes a room needs remarkably little to become interesting. We tend to discover this after pricing new furniture.

The pleasure of a small interruption

A room can be lovely and still leave you strangely unmoved.

You chose everything carefully. The wood tones are sympathetic. The cushions have agreed on a general direction. Nothing is actively causing trouble.

Perhaps that’s the trouble.

When every object confirms what the previous object has already told us, we stop looking quite so closely. We understand the room. Our eyes have completed the assignment.

A little red gives them something else to do.

Against brown wood, cream upholstery or an olive wall, it introduces a moment of friction. The room becomes harder to absorb in one glance. A familiar arrangement asks for another look.

This is one of the quieter pleasures of decorating: changing the experience of things you already own. A red candlestick can make an old wooden table seem darker, richer, more deliberate. The table hasn’t improved itself overnight. It has acquired interesting company.

Most of us could benefit from the same arrangement.

Red has more than one personality

The word red is partly responsible for our reluctance to use it. It suggests a fire engine, a lipstick, a warning issued by someone wearing a headset.

But red also lives in the skin of a plum, the inside of an old velvet jewellery box, the faded lettering on a shopfront.

A brownish red can settle beautifully into a room. Burgundy has depth and a certain private-club confidence. Tomato red is livelier, especially against pale blue. A clear cherry red in glossy glass catches light and becomes something quite different from the same colour in wool.

Finish matters. So does shape.

A piece like the red Lorin glass bowl, with its extravagant ruffled edge, brings movement as well as colour. Its outline is part of the attraction: something halfway between a flower and a very good party skirt.

Byon’s description of Lorin makes that connection to ruffled clothing explicit. You can see it in the folds. The bowl seems rather overdressed for holding a few walnuts, which is part of its appeal.

Neither the colour nor the shape requires you to become a person who describes herself as “bold with interiors.”

You can remain exactly as you are, only with a better bowl.

Give it something to disagree with

Red is especially good beside materials that have had a life.

Worn timber. Tarnished brass. A clay pot whose surface refuses to be perfectly smooth.

These things have enough character to hold their own. Their irregularities make room for the red to be vivid without making the whole arrangement feel newly purchased.

Picture glossy red glass beside a weathered vessel. The glass catches the light; the clay absorbs it. One surface is fluid and reflective. The other holds onto every mark.

There’s a relationship there.

The contrast gives you more to notice: smooth against rough, bright against dark, precise against slightly battered. It also lets contemporary pieces enter an older room without requiring the older room to update its entire personality.

This is why I keep coming back to pottery. It gives a glossy new object something substantial to sit beside. The age and texture make the combination feel less like a display and more like somebody lives there.

Preferably somebody with opinions.

You don’t have to distribute it evenly

Once we introduce a colour, we often feel obliged to provide evidence that we meant it.

The red bowl acquires a red cushion. Then a print. Then something small for the other side of the room, because apparently colour requires witnesses.

Repetition can be beautiful. But an isolated accent has its own particular confidence.

Let the bowl be the red thing for a while.

Live with it through breakfast, an untidy afternoon, an evening with the lamps on. Notice whether you keep enjoying the interruption. You may eventually want another red detail somewhere else. You may find the single object has already done enough.

A home can accommodate a decision without turning it into a policy.

Start somewhere you actually spend time

There’s a temptation to reserve our most interesting things for occasions when other people will see them.

The good glasses wait in the cupboard. The table gets properly set when someone is coming. Meanwhile, we eat Tuesday’s dinner beside a charging cable and a letter we’re avoiding.

Small red details work beautifully in these ordinary places.

A few red Porto napkin rings can bring life to plain linen and familiar dishes. A beige and bordeaux Lara candlestick gives a shelf or supper table a deeper, quieter version of the same idea.

You don’t need to stage an event around them. Tuesday has done nothing to deserve the charging cable.

A manageable amount of nerve

Small objects give us a useful place to practise trusting ourselves.

Choosing a sofa involves money, logistics and the knowledge that returning it may require a van. Choosing a candlestick offers considerably more freedom.

Yet we can bring the same committee of imagined opinions to both.

Will it go? Will I tire of it? What does it say about the room?

Occasionally, the answer is simply that you liked it. You saw the colour against the wood and felt a small, immediate pleasure. That deserves some authority.

A red object is a manageable commitment to your own taste. You can move it. You can put it away. You can discover that you prefer it somewhere entirely different.

For now, it’s there: a little conspicuous, catching the afternoon light, making the old table worth looking at again.

-Juliette

Image credit: Original room photograph by Jasper Fry.