Try paint colours on a room before you commit

The light here is not the light in a paint catalogue. On the coast it is brighter, cooler and moves faster, and it bounces off water and cloud all day. A colour that looks settled in a showroom can go chalky by a north window and sour by a south one.

That is why we treat the visualiser as a way of narrowing choices rather than making them. Once you have two or three schemes you like, the next step is a physical sample on the actual wall, looked at in the morning, at midday and after dark with the lights on.

North-facing rooms want warmth: creams, warm off-whites and greige with some red or yellow in them. South-facing rooms can carry cooler greys and greens without looking cold. East rooms are warm first thing and cool later; west rooms the opposite, and they glow in the evening, which flatters clay and ochre tones.

Sheen changes everything. The same shade in matt on a wall and in eggshell on the skirting will not look the same, the eggshell reads darker and richer because it reflects more. If you want the woodwork to disappear into the wall, go a touch lighter on the woodwork.

Exteriors are their own subject. Salt air, wind-driven rain and strong sun age a colour fast, so mid-tones on render age more gracefully than very pale or very dark ones, and a front door in a deep heritage blue or a brick red is a Cornish tradition for a reason: it stays looking intentional.

The colours we use come from Farrow & Ball, Little Greene, Tikkurila and Teknos. Every swatch in the visualiser is matched to a shade from one of their ranges, each linked to the manufacturer’s own page for it, and the summary tells you exactly which one so the tin that arrives is the colour you chose.