Be careful with your choice of interior wall paint colour

28th January 2019

At Octopus we decorate a lot of office interiors, usually in brilliant white, magnolia, off-whites such as timeless or RAL 9010, various shades of grey or really bold accent colours to meet customers’ specific tastes or to match company colours. But until now, never have we been asked to use Natrual Taupe.

A customer of ours recently instructed us to decorate their London office walls in Dulux Natural Taupe 4. They had already purchased a sample pot and painted a small patch of wall just to be sure, and it came out just as they expected – a slightly off-white pale beige appearance, exactly what they were after. My decotators set about painting the entire office and it was only when I went in to check on progress a couple of days later, after they had already completed 2 full coats, that I suspected that perhaps this wasn’t the colour our customer was expecting. It was, most definitely, a pale pink! This was not just my opinion but that too of everyone else who subsequently looked at it. Interestingly, I first saw it at 6am on a winter’s morning under artificial office lighting, and as daylight began filling the space, it started to look less pink, but one lesser or greater shade of pink or another it remained regardless of light levels in the office.

My first reaction was mild panic. We were fitting the new carpets the following day and having the new desks and chairs installed a day after that. If we had to re-decotate the office it could be a complete disaster. Had we ordered the wrong paint? Had our supplier mixed the wrong colour by mistake or was their paint mixing machine faulty? I rushed down to a different supplier and got them to mix a small sample pot (I wasn’t going to risk going to our regular supplier and getting them to mix another one just in case their machine was faulty and gave us an identical repeat of the wrong colour), and I also took away an official Dulux colour card. To my relief, the new paint matched exactly, as did the colour card. So, as it turned out, a paint colour that appeared almost white on a small test patch and sample card, was pink when applied to a large wall area.

To test this further, I collected a handful of colour cards from Homebase whilst doing my weekend supermarket shop at Sainsbury’s next door, taking a selection from the ‘browns’ of which Natural Taupe 4 was one, and another selection from the neutrals/greys. Outside in the car park in natural daylight and held up against my white car, all of the palest brown colours of each range did indeed look slightly pink.

The result: After the carpets and furniture were fitted, we had to put down full carpet protection and dust covers everywhere, mask up and start again in a different colour in ultra quick time. We got paid for it as our customer acknowledged that it was not our error, but we would rather have not had to go through this for our own sake as well as our customer’s as it involved a lot of extra effort and very tight & unexpected deadlines.

The lesson: The lightest shades of brown can and do look pink. The greater the amount of daylight, the lesser the effect. The lower the level of natural daylight and the warmer the artificial lighting, the deeper the shade of pink becomes. Other factors that can effect the appearance are the texture of the walls and the type of paint. A flat matt compared with a silk or eggshell in exactly the same colour will look different due to the amount of light reflection.

Conclusion: If it’s your home, experiment by starting small and expanding to the whole area if it looks ok. If it’s your office, play it safe and go white or as neutral as possible (or very bold with accent walls if you dare!), but don’t take the chance with pale colours over large areas unless you’re absolutely sure. If you get it wrong at home, it’s probably a minor inconvenience. If you get it wrong in the office, you might be preventing your business from functioning properly until you reslove the problem.

Sit-Stand Desks – Are they worth it?

21st February 2018

Everyone is talking about sit-stand desks. All the office furniture manufacturers offer them and, it seems, are pushing like crazy trying to get us to buy them. Walk into any showroom in Clerkenwell and you’ll see these things prominently displayed – not just one but often a large bench configuration featuring 4 or 6 desks occupying a considerable amount of prime showroom space. But are they worth it, does anyone buy them and should you be buying them?

As an office desking supplier, I’d love it if all my customers bought Sit-Stand desks rather than conventional ones. We’d increase our turnover and profit three or four fold! But they don’t and it boils down to cost. One of our standard desks will cost you around £150, whereas a light duty electrically operated desk comes in at around £400 and a heavy duty/bench type at £600 plus. That’s more than 4 times the cost of a regular desk and most businesses are simply not able to justify it.

But cost aside, do they offer benefits and if we could afford them, should we have them? The answer is probably yes to both questions. Quite what and how much benefit these desks deliver is open to debate but for sure at least some of your employees would use them as intended. And even if it brings no obvious physical health benefit but instead gives the employee a sense of wellbeing (the fact that you’ve made an investment in something on their behalf that they believe is doing them some good), then of course it’s worth it – happy workers are productive workers and all that! Studies have been done into the benefits of alternating between sitting and standing at a desk but no doubt more needs to be done before we see conclusive facts and figures. But I suggest that much of the justification centres around the already well established and universally accepted knowledge that sitting at a desk in a static position for the best part of 8 hours a day is not all that good for your back or your fitness. Absolutely, I’ll go along with that! Having spent 40 years doing competitive rowing and also playing rugby in my youth, my back needs to be treated with care and long durations of sitting or standing really doesn’t help me.

So, we’ve always been told to take breaks from sitting and get up and walk around to exercise the spine, muscles and joints. But of course people for whom work is predominantly desk-bound can’t keep going off for a stroll otherwise they’re not going to get their work finished, so a height adjustable sit-stand desk is the obvious solution to the problem!

But before we start thinking that a £600+ desk is going to be the answer to work-related back problems, it’s probably correct to say that it is just part of a solution that might benefit some people.

The other, and in my opinion more fundamental part of the solution, would be to make sure that whilst people are sitting at their desks, they have a chair that provides a high degree of support and functionality, and that they have adjusted it correctly and are using it as intended! In other words, a decent ergonomic task chair with all the adjustments, support and mechanisms that aid good sitting. If your budget is limited and you really can’t extend it to sit-stand desks, then spend as much money as you can afford on Synchronous Mechanism Task Chairs or other advanced ergonomic chairs instead and make sure your staff receive instruction on how to use them. This will at least help to minimise the negative aspects of sitting down and just maybe your staff won’t develop the back niggles in the first place that lead to them needing to stand up or walk around at regular intervals!

To conclude. If you can afford it, treat your entire office to Sit-Stand desks and high quality ergonomic task chairs. If you can’t justify the sit stand desks, then spend as much as you can afford on ergonomic chairs. Your staff will be appreciate it and you may just get more out of them in return.