Every article about colour is really about paint. Almost nobody writes about the harder version, which is choosing a colour you will still be living with in fifteen years.
Choosing colour in furniture is a different discipline from choosing paint, because you can repaint a wall in a weekend and you cannot repaint a sofa. The colours that survive that commitment are the ones drawn from the natural world: olive, moss, terracotta, oak, plum, brown with gold in it. Green in particular is now doing the job grey has done for the last fifteen years, working as a neutral rather than a statement. It lasts because your eye has been looking at it your whole life.
Something took over our showroom floor this year and I did not plan a single part of it.
I noticed it properly one afternoon when I stood still and counted what was in front of me. Eight pieces, ordered separately, months apart, from different factories in different countries. Four of them green. The rest oak, terracotta, natural wood and one black. Not a scheme. Not a plan. Just what I kept choosing, over and over, without registering that I was doing it.
So this piece is what I have worked out since, about why these colours are everywhere at the moment, why some of them will still look right in ten years and some will not, and how to choose one when you cannot simply change your mind in a weekend.
The difference nobody accounts for
Almost everything written about colour in interiors is written about walls. Colour of the year, accent wall, five shades for a north facing room. All useful, and all describing a decision you can undo on a Saturday for the price of a tin.
Furniture is not that. A made to order sofa is a considered purchase with a real lead time attached, and once the fabric goes on it, it is on. You are not repainting it because the mood has moved on. You are living with that decision through several redecorations, at least one house move, and quite possibly a change in what you like.
Which is why I am careful about the word trend. A trend on a wall is fun. A trend on a sofa is expensive. The colours worth putting on furniture are the ones that were never really a trend to begin with.
Green has quietly become the new neutral
This is the shift I did not see coming, and it is worth being precise about what I mean by it.
Green is not being used as a statement any more. It is being used as a base. It is the thing the rest of the room sits against, which is the job grey has been doing since about 2010 and beige was doing before that. When someone specifies a deep green sofa now, they are not being bold. They are choosing the calm option and building outwards from it.
You can see it in the way people talk about it in the showroom. Nobody asks whether the green is too much. They ask which green.
The eight pieces I did not plan
Here is the count, because it makes the point better than I can:
- The Bontempi table with the floating top, in spessart oak
- The Bontempi Amelie chair, in olive
- The Meridiani René swivel chair, in green
- The Bontempi bar stools, in a green I call matcha
- A Porada night stand, in natural wood, which we are using as a side table purely to add warmth
- An Arketipo piece, in black
- The Papadatos Fleur, arriving in green
- My own office chair, a Bontempi Penelope, in terracotta
Not a scheme. Nobody sat down and planned four greens, two woods, a black and a terracotta. It is just what my hand keeps going to, which is how I know this is not something I read about in a forecast.
Why these colours behave like neutrals
It took me a while to work out what all of them have in common, and when it landed it was almost embarrassingly simple.
None of these colours are invented. Olive, moss, matcha, terracotta, oak, plum, brown with gold running through it. They are natural elements. They are the colours of things that grow, weather and get old outdoors, and several of them are the colours of the pigments people have actually been grinding out of the ground for tens of thousands of years. The earth pigments, the ochres and umbers and siennas, are terracotta and olive by another name.
Which is why your eye does not read them as a decision. It has been looking at them your entire life, and every life before yours. A bright cobalt announces itself because nothing in a field is that colour. Olive does not announce anything, because everything is.
That is also the practical test for whether a colour will last on furniture. Ask where it exists in nature. If the answer is nowhere, be careful, because you are relying on fashion to keep liking it for you.
The greens are not interchangeable
This is where most people come unstuck, because green is not one colour and the four on our floor behave completely differently.
Deep, almost black green
The most forgiving of the lot, and the closest thing to a true neutral. From across a room it reads as a dark tone rather than a colour, and it only reveals itself when you get near it or the light moves. If you want something that will never look dated but is not grey, this is it. It also hides a great deal, which matters on a piece people actually sit on.
Olive
Warmer, because there is yellow and brown underneath it. Olive sits beautifully against timber and brass and terrible against cool greys, which is the mistake I would most want to save you from. If your floor is a warm oak, olive will look inevitable. If everything else in the room is cold, it will look muddy and you will blame the olive when the problem is the room.
Matcha and the lighter greens
The riskiest and the most enjoyable. A lighter, yellower green has real personality, so it works best on smaller pieces where it can be a moment rather than the whole room. Bar stools, a single chair, something you see and smile at. I would think carefully before putting it on a four metre sofa.
Moss and the muted mid greens
The safest bet for anything large. Muted enough to live with, warm enough not to feel institutional, and it pairs with almost every natural material without argument. If you are nervous and the piece is big, start here.
Terracotta is harder than green, and worth it
Terracotta does not have green’s ability to disappear. It is warm, it is slightly loud, and it changes character completely depending on what is beside it. Against cream and timber it is soft and almost inevitable. Against a cool grey it turns orange and looks like a mistake.
So I use it differently. Terracotta belongs on the smaller commitment: the desk chair, a vase, a leather detail, one armchair in a room of quiet things. Not the biggest piece you own. That is not timidity, it is just how the colour behaves.
Which is why my own office chair is a Bontempi Penelope, in terracotta. Nobody orders a Penelope in terracotta to impress a client. You order it for yourself, on an ordinary Tuesday, because you like it. And it is exactly the size of commitment the colour suits.
The reason it works alongside green at all is that they are neighbours in the natural world rather than opposites in a colour wheel. Clay and leaf. You have seen them together every time you have looked at a plant pot.
What a black sofa taught me about warmth
The Arketipo on our floor is black, which by rights should be the coldest thing in the building.
I softened it with buttery yellows and creams, and put the right lighting on it, and it has turned into the corner people want to sit and read in. Not the calm green one. The black one.
That taught me the thing I would most want you to take from this whole piece. Warmth is not a colour. It is what you put beside the colour. A black sofa in a room of chrome and cool white is cold. The same sofa with cream wool, a warm bulb and a timber table beside it is the cosiest thing you own. People blame the colour when what is actually wrong is the company it is keeping.
Three mistakes worth avoiding
Treating it as an accent
One green cushion on a grey sofa reads as an apology. These colours work when they are structural, when they are the chair or the table top or the thing the room is genuinely built around, with everything else kept quiet. Half committing is what makes a colour look like a phase.
Putting them next to synthetic materials
These colours came out of the ground, so they want materials that did too. Olive and terracotta against real timber, stone, wool, brass and linen look inevitable. Against a high shine synthetic they look like a choice, and not a good one. This is also where quality of material starts doing visible work, and it is one of the few times I would say the expensive option is not just nicer, it is actually necessary for the colour to read properly.
Matching instead of relating
Four pieces in the identical green is a showroom display, not a home. The eight pieces on our floor work precisely because none of them match. Olive next to matcha next to oak next to terracotta is how a garden looks. One green repeated four times is how a hotel lobby looks.
How to test a colour before you commit
Everything above is theory. This is the part that actually protects you, and it costs nothing.
Get the real sample, not the photograph. A screen is backlit and a fabric is not. Every serious brand will send swatches through us, and I would never let someone commit to a colour they have only seen on a phone.
Look at it in your own room, not in ours. Our lighting is designed to make things look good. Yours is designed to let you find your keys. Take the swatch home and put it where the piece will actually live.
Look at it three times in one day. Morning, mid afternoon and under the lamps at night. Deep greens in particular change dramatically, which is the whole charm of them and also how people get surprised.
Put it next to what it will have to live beside. Your floor, your curtains, the artwork you are not going to part with. Colours do not fail on their own, they fail in company.
Leave it a week. If you still want it after a week of walking past it, you want it. Almost every colour regret I have heard about came from a decision made in an afternoon.
None of this is complicated, and all of it is easier than living with the wrong answer for a decade. If you are specifying for a client rather than yourself, the same sequence applies, and our trade service exists partly to make the swatch part painless. We are a Platinum partner of the British Institute of Interior Design, one of only six, and a good deal of what that partnership involves in practice is exactly this sort of unglamorous groundwork.
Will it date?
Honestly, some of it will. The very specific, very of the moment shades always do, and if you are buying a lighter statement green you should buy it knowing that.
The deeper, more muted end of it I think is safe, for the same reason it works in the first place. It was not invented by a forecasting agency. Organisations like Pantone are very good at naming where taste is going, but they did not invent olive, and olive was not waiting for permission.
The question I would ask before committing to anything expensive is not whether it is in fashion. It is whether you would still want it if nobody else had it. That is a surprisingly uncomfortable question and it is a very good filter.
Come and stand in front of it
There is a limit to how much of this is useful in writing, because every photograph in this article is lying to you slightly. Screens add contrast, cameras shift greens towards blue, and no image has ever accurately conveyed what a velvet does when you walk past it.
The eight pieces described here are all on the floor or on their way, along with the fabric libraries from Bontempi, Flexform, Meridiani, Porada and the rest of the houses we are appointed by. Ranges from Meridiani and Bontempi in particular run to dozens of shades that never make it into a catalogue photograph.
The showroom is in High Barnet, easy from anywhere in North London or Hertfordshire, by appointment seven days a week. Bring a photograph of your floor. It is more useful than you would think.
And if you are weighing up a surface rather than a colour, the companion piece to this one is our guide to ceramic against marble, which is the same argument about living with a decision, applied to a table top.
Frequently asked questions
Is green really the new neutral?
In furniture, yes. Green is increasingly being specified as a base colour rather than an accent, doing the job grey did for the last fifteen years. The deeper and more muted the green, the more it behaves like a neutral, to the point where a very dark green reads simply as a dark tone until you are close to it.
What colours go with olive green furniture?
Warm and natural materials rather than specific colours: timber, brass, stone, cream, wool and linen. Olive has yellow and brown underneath it, so it flatters anything warm and fights anything cool. Terracotta, plum and gold shot browns sit beside it comfortably because they belong to the same natural family. Cool greys are the main thing to avoid.
Will a green sofa date?
A deep or muted green is unlikely to, because it functions as a neutral and neutrals age slowly. A bright or very fashionable shade is more exposed. If you are buying something large and expensive, choose the quieter end and put the personality into smaller pieces you can change more easily.
How do I choose a furniture colour without seeing it in person?
Get a physical swatch, which any authorised dealer can order for you, and look at it in the room where the piece will live rather than in a showroom. Check it in morning light, afternoon light and under lamps at night, put it against your floor and anything you are keeping, then leave it a week before deciding. Never commit to a colour seen only on a screen.
Can I mix different greens in one room?
Yes, and it usually looks better than matching. Several distinct greens together read as natural, the way a garden does, whereas the same green repeated across four pieces reads as a showroom display. Vary the depth and let the materials differ too.
Is terracotta hard to live with?
Harder than green, because it cannot recede the way a deep green can and it changes character sharply depending on what is beside it. It is at its best on smaller commitments such as a chair, a vessel or a leather detail, in a room where the larger pieces are quiet. Against cream and timber it is lovely. Against cool grey it turns orange.
How do I make a dark or black piece feel warm?
Change what is around it rather than the piece itself. Buttery yellows, creams, warm timber and the right lighting will turn a black sofa into the cosiest seat in the house. Warmth is not a property of the colour, it comes from the company it keeps, which is why the same piece can feel cold in one room and inviting in another.