Farrow & Ball

Overview

Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2021

Farrow & Ball started in 1946 as the project of two Dorset chemists, John Farrow and Richard Ball, who built their first factory in Verwood and spent years supplying paint to Ford, Raleigh Bicycles, and the British Admiralty before anyone thought to hang their colors on a wall for the color alone. When the rest of the industry moved to cheaper acrylics in the '70s and '80s, Farrow & Ball held onto its old, pigment-heavy recipes instead — the kind of stubbornness that turned into a signature. Everything is still mixed in Dorset, the same region where it all started.

Kelly Wearstler x Farrow & Ball — image-1

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The Partnership

Color isn't incidental to how Wearstler works — it's close to the whole point of it, the first tool she reaches for when a room needs an emotional register. Farrow & Ball had already been part of that toolkit for more than twenty years before the two ever formally partnered, which meant the collaboration wasn't really a pitch so much as a formality: she'd been specifying these pigments, trusting this paint, living with these colors on other people's walls long before she mixed one of her own. When Farrow & Ball went looking for its first outside designer in company history, they weren't approaching a stranger.

Kelly Wearstler x Farrow & Ball — image-4

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The California Collection

Eight colors, each one pinned to something specific in the California landscape rather than a mood board: Tar for sun-baked desert highway asphalt, Sand for Malibu's beaches, Citrona for the state's lemon trees, Palm for the palms lining the LA skyline. Salt takes its crispness from Pacific sea spray, Hazy from the marine fog that rolls in some mornings, Stoke from an overcast coastal sky, and Faded Terracotta from pots and tiles left out long enough in the sun to lose their edge. None of it is abstraction — it's eight very specific hours of California weather, bottled.