The Color Digest · Compare
Settled, side by side
Calke Green
Farrow & Ball · No. 34
The green from the breakfast room at Calke Abbey
Le Cygne
Ressource · R238
The Paris apartment white
In real rooms
Every room, each colorThe difference
Read from the numbersCalke Green leans neutral where Le Cygne reads warm. Calke Green is a greens, Le Cygne a whites.
How they read
In their own wordsCalke Green takes its name from the breakfast room at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, and it has the settled, slightly faded quality of a color that has been on a wall for two hundred years. It is a mid-tone green with enough grey to stay calm and enough yellow to stay warm — the green of gardens rather than forests.
Le Cygne — the swan — is a warm, matte ivory from the French house Ressource. It has the chalky, light-absorbing quality of old lime plaster, which is why it looks so at home on Haussmann panelling and ceiling roses: it softens the light rather than bouncing it around. Cream is present, yellow is not.