I never tried the color Babouche before but my whole house is painted w/ Farrow & Ball. I used their primer but you don't have to. For the walls, I applied 2 coats. I used Estate emulsion for most rooms and Modern emulsion for bathrooms. The result was fantastic !!! The colors are soft, mellow, beautiful and they shift through out the day to different shades.

I don't think I would ever use anything else in my house. My kids room are painted with another brand and I am going to repainted those rooms in F&B. :-) Yes, as you can tell, I'm addicted to F&B paint.

Haven't used the color, but I can say the paint is a joy to work with. When I spoke with F&B in Canada, they suggested using the paint, thinned with a bit of water as a primer. I kid you not. Weirdest advice I've ever heard. I just put up three coats instead. But partly because I enjoyed working with it so much, I just couldn't stop. (Yes, I am crazy.) It goes on better than any other paint I've used. (BM, SW, EK/ICI, C2, Citron) There is no smell. And the finish is gorgeous, most likely due to their use of mineral pigments.

I have a sample pot of Citron, a slightly less intense version of Babouche.

The F&B paint is about as good as it gets. It goes on beautifully and creates a wonderful surface. It almost seems to skim coat the walls rather than soak in.

We put it on over a pale BM color and it covered perfectly in 2 coats. No primer.

It has a wonderful affect in the room and changes color a bit during the day.

All their colors are slightly muted however, in the English style. So while I expect Babouche to be very egg yolk, it won't be harsh.

I'm planning to repaint and use their colors. The only thing about them that's a downside is that the color card doesn't match anything, nor does the fandeck very well. So I tend to spend time in the showroom as they have large samples there.

To be sure of a color, a sample pot is a must-have. You are welcome to my Citron, which I'm not using, if your Babouche doesn't go.

Thank you, everyone. I guess I have to track down a showroom before I go any further. This may be difficult.

Has anyone done F&B without having a "retail stockist" near you? The closest is Cox Paint, which would be a mail order.

Hey, how about we (I say "we" freely :)) do a thread of F&B colors specifically, for those of us without retail stockists near us? Would folks be willing to do that? In the gallery, probably, for best preservation...

That's a great idea !! I subscribe to Canadian house & home and they do use F&B a lot in that magazine. Recently, I started to see F&B mentioned in US magazines as well. The problem w/ F&B is that what you see in a picture isn't always what you get because the color is so transmutable.

The painter my GC uses--the only painter whom I was allowed to use--laughed at me when I said I wanted a "deep white" in the gallery. But you understand, don't you?

I'd be happy to help with the F&B colors as I am close to the showroom and have an account with them. I need to go over there again next week. I always take my fabric swatches and samples to see which pots I need.

The paint can be ordered from them directly on the phone, as can the sample pots.

I have close to a dozen colors -- most of the yellows -- which are already on sample boards because I've been mulling the yellow for my bedroom and the cream for the hallway and kitchen. I've looked at Citron, Yellow Ground, Farrow's Cream and Dorset Cream.

Their whites are very nuanced and there is a great selection of them. I'll probably go with White Tie though I'm also considering Pointing, which is a bright white -- both for woodwork. I'm thinking of going with Lamp Room Gray for the laundry room woodwork with more of the green ground on the wall. But I'm not certain yet about that.

Email to my name at yahoo so I know what to photo first.

The downside, as I said, with them is that neither the color card nor the fan deck are true to color.

My guestroom was painted with their Green Ground -- a celery color -- and, like Bellaflora, I'm thrilled. My experience has been the same as hers. It is a small room which went from drab to fab with 2 coats of paint (and a change of quilt).

Just did sample swatches from another brand of paint, which has lovely colors, but the surface quality doesn't compare.

rococogurl: I'm painting my office Green ground (!) It's currently CORD which is lovely but I'm changing my design direction. :-)

Detective: Try off-white. This color is very chameleonic: changing between almond, pale cream, grey, pale green. I think it would make an excellent background for artwork. It's very sophisticated and can look both modern and aged at the same time. Pointing is milky-not too creamy, Lime white has pale yellow undertone. I think I have almost everyone of their whites in sample pots so if you are interested I can mail them to you.

In my master bath, I tried this combination of Powder blue + Off white + a touch of Vert de Terre and the result is baffling: the color changed between blue and sombre grey and green ..amazing!!

Colors I've tried (either in this house or previous ones or other ones I've worked on):
Ball green, Light stone, String, Cord, Green ground, Cooking apple green, Stone white, Powder blue, dix blue, arsenic, Off white, Pointing, Pink ground, green blue (or is it blue green?), Teresa green, Vert de terre...I'm sure there were more but that's all I can think of for now. :-)

Use F&B -- you won't be disappointed. My house is Malibu beach house meets English farmhouses. Mr. Darcy goes Hollywood kinda thing and I gotta say F&B is the only paint that can manage to look both modern/restraint and rich/opulent at the same time. You'll see what I meant. This paint has depth.

Bellaflora -- Could we perhaps do a swatch swap? I would love to have a sample of Pink Ground. Have most of the whites plus others.

I also will paint my office in the apartment with the Green Ground. I find it very soothing and serene.

I take it USPS will not allow this in the mail? I would like to take up both your offers. Rgurl, I will email. I'm interested in whites, yellows, pale blues and aquas, corals and terra cottas, and dull greens and putty. I am not yet familiar with many of the F&B names. We built in the woods, although a few of the trees had to come down (they are now are structural ceiling beams), so there is a lot of variation in our light depending upon when the sun shines through the leaves and so forth. A couple of bedrooms with SW-MS Bone China looks green in the afternoon.

Both usps and ups work. Baggies prevent problems.

rococogrl: I checked and my Pink ground all dried up. It's been a while since I painted that color (used to be DD's nursery at our old house ) -- I am going to get some more sample soon because I'm deciding between that color and Calamine for her new room (with silver accent for extra glam!) :-)

Detective: I just remember that I did let my cousin borrowed a whole bunch of my samples ...however, I still have these:

blue ground
tallow
biscuit
dix blue
ball green
powder blue
string
light blue
bone
chappelle green
off white
lime white
house white
shaded white (gorgeous!!)
clunch (double gorgeous!!)
french gray (very good for wood work)
pale powder
Vert de Terre
blue green

I think my cousin has
Light stone
Cord
Fawn
Savage ground
and some more whites but I don't remember.

I also have the color painted on 8x11 card as large swatches if you are interested in borrowing. I used them to eliminate colors before painting the final choices on the wall.

I'd love to borrow the cards and return them later, of course. I'm going to the F&B website to figure out, roughly, what those names you listed mean and I'll come back after that.

kd -- you can get a folding card that will give you the current colors with the names and a description. that's free -- the form is on the website. It takes about 10 days to get. But it's not quite accurate.

The fandeck isn't exact either, which is why I go to the showroom to check.

Meanwhile, here is Babouche (r ) Citron (c) and Yellow Ground (l) which are fairly close in color. Of course the camera and the monitors skew them but you get the idea.

There's a drapery thread over on the atticmag forum which has my yellow draperies with color samples of Citron that are quite accurate colorwise.

Okay, from what I can tell, I'd like to see
tallow
off-white
lime white
house white
shaded white
clunch

Apart from those, I'm interested in all the yellows, Farrow's cream Loggia, Green ground, Arsenic, Book room red, and Borrowed light.

So, if Bellaflora can provide the first group and RGurl some of the second, that would help me tremendously.

Oh, we were posting simultaneously. True to my monitor's form, all three of those look tan on my monitor. I'm going over to atticmag to take a look.

Here's the Green Ground in a room setting. It photographed a bit grey but there's always some camera distortion coupled with monitor distortion. If the 3 samples above look beige rather than yellow, see about calibrating your monitor settings for RGB. That should help. (I forgot how to do it but google should tell you).

On atticmag, the color of your curtains is a touch less intense than the background color of the toile that I'm trying to match. The toile has a blue medallion pattern, which may make the yellow look more intense. The big paint sample looks really close, maybe a touch softer, but in a large area, who knows? The little yellow patch, which you say matches your curtains IRL, looks more orange on my monitor. So I'm off to find out how to adjust my monitor, which may need a lot more than that adjustment. The green ground looks beautiful, but it will probably be too much color for our study, which has 10' high moss green on moss green embroidered silk curtains and Roman shades. So I'm considering a more putty-ish color.

I wish you guys would post photos of your rooms painted with F&B: I would LOVE to see them!

Just discovered my monitor does not have the capability of any truer color than it already shows. Dismal.

KD: if you send me your address via email I can send you the sample cards this weekend. Just mail them back to me when you are done.

I think lime white, clunch, string, light stone would be great w/ your moss green draperies. And if you want more contrast then hay or Cord are good candidates. My style tends toward the pale & muted shades so I instinctively reject stronger yellows but I imagine it can be quite rich w/ the green silk.

Green ground is definitely celery. Probably wrong colorway for moss but there are plenty of putty colors.

I can send you a copy of the Citron, which is what you see near my curtains. I have other yellows as well. I think I know the yellow you mean with the toile. The difference between the yellows are which have green/brown and which don't.

I'm a little late to this thread, but my whole house is painted in F&B too - I echo all of the comments above about how great their paint is, I love the colours, the selection is so well-edited and the finish is just amazing. In-house sampling is essential though, even the large painted swatches in-store look completely different inside my house.

In my house, I've used:

Farrow's Cream
Picture Gallery Red
Light Blue
Parma Gray
Dimity
Cooking Apple Green (now painted over with the red, but still have some photos)
Pointing (trim colour throughout house)

Photobucket seems to be down right now, but I'll try to post some pictures later. I agree that we should start up a F&B thread in the gallery.

Many of the designers where I live use F&B. Here's a link to the website of one I know uses the paint. No paint color ID but plenty of pix. If you're familiar with the range it's not hard to see what's what (more or less)

Here is a link that might be useful: Bunny Williams

Oh, the yellows are for a guest room, not the study/library! I'm looking at the non-yellow colors for various rooms: study, powder room, gallery, maybe laundry room, mudroom bathroom, for now. Thank you for that offer, Bella Flora, but I was unable to get an email address for you through GW. Do you want to send me email address through GW? It has worked in the past.
I like Bunny Williams's work very much. Despite all the skill and knowledge involved, her rooms usually look as though they evolved naturally over time, comfortably, without trying too hard, and I really like that (not to mention the beauty of the components). Our house is based, slightly loosely, on a 19th century stone farmhouse and I thought the F&B mellowness would be a way to go, although Central Texas is far from NY or London. (My only wild rooms are one of the guest bedrooms and the laundry/mudroom.)

Hey KD: I cannot send your email thru GW either. However, I went in and update my profile so you can try again.

I won't have access to the right computer until much later today. I'll check email then. Thanks!