Three greens and none of them the same

A client will say green and mean one thing; we will hear green and think of eleven. The gap between those is where most of the difficulty in a commission lives, and it is not solved by a swatch, because a hundred millimetre swatch held in the hand under a studio light tells you almost nothing about a square metre of the same sheet in a north window.

What we do instead is hang the candidate sheets in the opening. Actually in it, on wire, at full size, for a week if we can. Clients who have been unable to choose from swatches for a month will choose in ninety seconds standing in the room.