The Color Digest · Compare
Settled, side by side
Le Cygne
Ressource · R238
The Paris apartment white
Calke Green
Farrow & Ball · No. 34
The green from the breakfast room at Calke Abbey
In real rooms
Every room, each colorThe difference
Read from the numbersLe Cygne leans warm where Calke Green reads neutral. Le Cygne is a whites, Calke Green a greens.
How they read
In their own wordsLe 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.
Calke 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.