Light up the greige - decorate your life
- Katharine Ricks
- Apr 3
- 3 min read
I have spent the past 6 weeks transforming a dreary, grey and beige office space into a colourful and joyous FuzzypegFolk shop, opening April 16th, which now lights up the Market Place in Bungay. So this month's tale is all about how to bring colour and fun into a corner of your life using folk art in all it's forms.
Decorating with or wearing a lot of colour is, at first, a bit daunting and I know that it's not everyone's cup of tea. So I am not going to advocate painting your walls bright yellow, blue or red as I have just done at the shop! Or flouncing about town in a bright red tartan dressing-gown, now a coat<, as I have been know to do...
Colour can instead come in small doses and still light up a non-descript room or outfit. Popular terms are a splash, hint, dash, touch, accent or pop of colour. But these usually refer to a single coloured area or object e.g. a couple of cushions, a feature wall or a scarf. When decorating with folk art you can create clusters of many colours and patterns with collections of objects or pictures, scattering them around the room here and there. These can clash or loosely coordinate and although the effect looks random overall there is a kind of pattern creating several colourful areas. This is very different to a contrived feature like a carefully placed cushion or vase which creates just a single accent to the rest of the decoration.
This means that the rest of the room does not have to coordinate with the folk art pieces, or have any colour theme at all. In fact it can be as neutral as you want to provide a backdrop to the swirls of colour you are creating with objects rather than with paint.
Believe it or not my whole house is painted white, with not a pop of wall colour in sight. This is because I have so many colourful things dotted all over the place it is these that create the decoration.
The key to achieving this is creating little collections of simple folky objects which can be arranged here and there where you have a space - on a shelf, a chair or a windowsill. This could be a collection of all the same kind of thing: brightly coloured vintage toys, different coloured enamelware pieces, a gallery wall of small, folk art pictures, Or it could be a motley collection of things which somehow sit happily together colour-wise. So the latter CAN be loosely coordinated - here are some examples from my house:
In the top pictures I have arranged a random collection of bits and pieces which are loosely red/yellow/turquoise/green with a bit of natural wood to soften things. They happened to pick out the colours in the lampshade and the picture which was luck not planned.
These are two alcoves I have at the top of each bookcase either side of our fireplace. My husband Will thinks they are a waste of space on which we could have more books but I love my messy rows of things. Neither coordinate with each other but each have things in the same colour family which brings the look together.
All the above plus more are dotted around my white-walled sitting room which has become my favourite room in our house (slightly weird light in the photo but hopefully you get the gist!).
We have 3 storeys so many, many stairs which wind up and down the side of the house like a tunnel. I have covered the walls in pictures and luckily each section has a tiny shelf half-way down which I have filled with my favourite folky things...hard to take pictures to capture just how many - here is about 10%!
I thought that this was just my personal style but apparently it is a thing and a trend (much to my dismay!). It is called "eclectic maximalism" or intentional clutter" and according to this year's Pinterest Predicts Trend Report, the "more is more" aesthetic is poised to be one of 2025’s biggest trends. It even has it's own hashtag #intentionalclutter
Goodness gracious.
It doesn't have to be a trend...just a way to light up your life and so make you feel happier and less greige inside and out. So look for things that make you smile and put clusters of them everywhere in your home, in every nook and cranny. There are many such treasures at FuzzypegFolk so have a look and transform your world from greige to a kaleidoscope of colour and fun.
