Living in Color, Designing with Light

Color carries mood and intention. In lighting, it becomes something you live inside. Designing with color is a practice of relationships. What matters is less a single shade than how tones sit together, and how they read once light moves through them. The same tone can feel warm at dusk and cool by midday, so in interiors, and above all in lighting, color and light are composed as one.

For over three decades we have practiced this relationship with silk, hand-dyeing and pleating textiles in the studio, watching how each one behaves as light passes through it and as it meets the tones beside it. Color has been our material as much as the silk that carries it.

From that research comes the Color Codex: a system for composing with color and light, sixteen hand-dyed Tussar tones, each named for what it evokes, from fine porcelain and dried cotton flowers to claystone walls and dewy grass.

Tones placed close together create harmony, an enveloping, unified atmosphere. Tones set further apart create contrast, dynamic and alive as light shifts through the day. Coal and Cream sit at one extreme: bricks inside a chimney meeting dried cotton flowers, a warm black against fine porcelain. Rust and Stone offer something warmer and more nuanced: the last sunbeams before sunset settling into a gloomy cave, Victorian red meeting a cup of strong Earl Grey. Sand and Shell, close in tone, gather into a single breath: sunkissed skin and tanned leather meeting honey and freshly washed linen.

These pairings are starting points, not rules. Our design team uses the Codex daily, developing custom color compositions across the collections, with mock-ups and color studies as part of the process.

Explore the Color Codex, and let it guide the way