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Colour and Materials Designer Anni Rantasalo: What Is More Important Than Colour Is How the Paint Is Produced And What Ingredients It Contains
For colour and materials designer Anni Rantasalo, colour comes from materials.
“Colours actually play a surprisingly small role in my day-to-day work”, master painter and colour and materials designer Anni Rantasalo says. Given that she has spent the past two decades working with colour and has for many years designed colour schemes for historic buildings, her statement does not sound entirely plausible at first.
“What I actually do is broader than that, I bring together the space, the history, the light, the seasons and the paint sheen levels. Because you can’t ever pin colour down”, she explains.
In practical terms, it is the materials that determine the colours. And when it comes to paint, colour matters less than the way that paint is made and what ingredients it actually contains.
“For me, colours are never just a series of numbers on a piece of paper. They’re a blend of different pigments held together with a carefully chosen binder.”
Rantasalo’s company, Maamusta, specialises in colour and materials design for pre-1950s buildings. Her priority, always, is to get to know the building she’s working on as well as possible. She does that by undertaking colour surveys, familiarising herself with all the available records and documents and by working and simply being within the space. The aim, often, is to carefully interpret a space, so that the right choice of colours can emerge through dialogue between historic styles and contemporary ones.
Work Akin to an Artist
One of Rantasalo’s recent projects was the Förenings-Banken building designed by Ernst G. Hedman and built in the seaside town of Hanko in 1903. When longstanding Hankoites Anna Piiroinen and Tomi Parkkonen began renovating the building’s interior in summer 2021, they turned to Rantasalo for her design and practical expertise. To reveal the original, or near-original, surfaces, many thick and badly cracked layers of acrylic and other paint were stripped from the small reception room walls. Once the walls had been smoothed out, everything was painstakingly retouched. This stage is akin to an artist at work; it’s the process that brings the results. “When you don’t have a lot of time, creating a colour scheme for a historic space in a way that is sensitive to its character is a challenge,” Rantasalo says.
Often the work is a balancing act between budgets, deadlines, practical requirements and client preferences as well as other designers, suppliers and builders and their ways of working. That compromises need to be made is a given. Through her years of working in this field, Rantasalo has discovered just how strongly people feel about colour. She hopes that clients understand that historic and listed buildings usually already have a bespoke colour scheme in place, and colours that we might be particularly drawn to ourselves in our contemporary moment, might not be the best solution.
Rantasalo prefers to figure out the space she will be working on by herself first before discussing it with the client or even her colleagues. “At the beginning of a project, my tool kit always consists of a pen, a sketch book and a selection of pigments and binders, usually linseed oil. I always mix my colours by hand, but by the time the painting starts they will have been converted into numerical codes.”
It can be difficult to give clients a clear sense of what the finished interior is going to look like, she explains. She tries to do that by creating a series of portable colour models that allow her to demonstrate the painting techniques, textures and degrees of sheen under different lighting conditions.
Historic and listed buildings usually already have a bespoke colour scheme in place, and colours that we might be particularly drawn to ourselves might not be the best solution.
Dark, Soft and Calm
Rantasalo uses plastic-free paints, as she finds that they are hardwearing and easy to look after, and they age beautifully too. They are also the best choice for the environment and indoor air quality.
“The shorter the list of ingredients, the better. We’re so much more aware now of the impact things like food additives and microplastics have on our health. We should really extend that awareness to the kind of paints that we use inside our homes.”
When she’s working on own projects and therefore under no time or budget pressures, Rantasalo likes to experiment with different techniques and materials. At her modest miller’s cottage in coastal Loviisa, she has covered the log walls in the bedroom with rag paper, painting it with distemper. The paint was tinted with Venetian red, yellow ochre and titanium white to match the colours on a scrap of original wallpaper found at the cottage. The lengths of linen fabric that cover the walls in the kitchen and living space have been painted with linseed oil paint, because Rantasalo was keen to experiment with this unusual combination. Both ideas have worked well in this historic, and unheated, space.
The designer says she tends to prefer colours on the darker end of the spectrum. What she always sets out to achieve is a soft and calm ambience, she says. “When you go for this darker colour scheme and combine it with well-designed materials and paints with different levels of sheen, you create these spaces that are just really lovely to be in. White walls are a fairly recent invention, and, in an old building, they’re simply anachronistic.” ↙