Take last week’s final of RTÉ One’s Home of the Year. The winner popped with colour, yet was calm and coherent. 

But there’s a fine line between a successful palette and inflicting so much colour that it contributes to a confined feel.

For once in the entire series, the judges (Hugh Wallace and Amanda Bone, of course) set aside their angsty, X Factor-style bickering and agreed with gentler judge Suzie McAdam when it came to elimination.

Colour fans, though, will say to go for it and try an adventurous shade. Paint is cheap so if you hate it, change it. But have you ever tried covering over dark green, blue or red? A coat of neutral emulsion slapped on over a weekend will not whitewash it away.

Experimenting with colour is a tricky business to embrace if you’ve lived with magnolia walls and a cream sofa for five years, but if you’d like a bit of handholding while venturing into the unknown, Geraldine James has penned a new book on the topic, Pop of Colour.

Having been home buyer for Selfridges, she’s also been pretty prolific on the publishing front in recent years, with interiors books covering everything from styling an Instagram-worthy shelf to getting the most out of flea market shopping. But unlike many other books touting colour, James provides context to explain how we have gone in the last ten to fifteen years from cool, white interiors to colour saturation. It’s a far slower process than we might have imagined.

She says, “Over the past decade, colour trends have been based around a grey palette. This has grown steadily darker, from dark grey to charcoal to almost black, and then expanded to include other dark colours, such as navy and forest green.”

Starting with gentle encouragement she explores easy-to-achieve solutions such as cushions and rugs, and accessories like glassware and decorative bowls in her chapter, A Pop of Textile Colour, also letting loose on checks, stripes and florals. If something looks wrong, she says to move it elsewhere, so no huge commitment to colour made here. 

She also encourages the toe-dipping experiment of using a single wall as a blank canvas which is enough to uplift a space but not overwhelm. But bold contrasts she suggests are not for the faint-hearted, although subtle ones she suggests as alternatives can be equally effective so you don’t feel under pressure to plunge into shocking pink with acid green. 

Despite my personal love of white and cream with soft pink, I can still appreciate the vogue for strong contrasts like navy with rich orange, a combination she demonstrates in the chapter Bold Pops where a bright orange bolster cushion lifts ultramarine bedroom walls. 

As the book progresses, she demonstrates how tonal colour pops involve adding more of the same colour but in varying shades, and for the maximalists the chapter A Pop of Multicolour goes all out on mix and vibrancy.

So, overall, it appears to be a case of, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Mercifully, she doesn’t preach that colour is the be all and end all, adding: “If a light, sunny, airy interior raises your mood, don’t slavishly follow fashion and go for a dark grey bedroom with pops of neon. It won’t make you happy.”

To which I say thank you on behalf of the colour-shy everywhere.

Tip of the week 

Read this one in tandem with Colour Now by Kevin McCloud of Channel 4’s Grand Designs. It’s an oldie but goodie, first published in 2009, and shows palettes of colour you never thought would work together, and calm ones at that.

A particularly wry chapter deals with how to use what we call today historic colours, but were actually the result of lack of basic hygiene in days of old. Today, they have chi-chi names like Elephant’s Breath and Downpipe, or what Eddie Izzard once called, and perhaps more accurately, a colour called Pants Left in the Wash.