Color becomes consistent As part of my research, I went to deepest Dorset, England to visit the headquarters of Farrow & Ball, founded in the 1980s when the English National Trust needed an expert to mix paints for its great houses in need of redecoration. Today Farrow & Ball paints, with terrific names like Clunch (from old slang for a chalk building block), Blackened (referring to when soot was used to make an off-white pigment with a silver tint), String, Downpipe and the startling Dead Salmon appeal to people wanting the colors in their sitting rooms to be just like the ones in British stately homes and then, sometimes, just a tad more eccentric. Before I went, I had a romantic image of the people at Farrow & Ball using many of the same pigments and ingredients that a 19th-century decorator would have used, but that is not the case. First of all, 19th-century decorators had to assemble the paint ingredients for themselves (as a young Irish immigrant noticed when he arrived in Brooklyn in the late 1870s, deciding there must be an easier way. His name was Benjamin Moore).Wall paint: French Gray, Farrow & Ball