The Little Greene Blog

Spring has sprung (almost!) so now’s the time to freshen up tired-looking exteriors!

Whether you want to liven up your masonry or give your front door a facelift, Little Greene has just the paint for you! With over 160 mouth-watering shades and a variety of environmentally-friendly finishes to choose from, you can give your home a makeover in an afternoon!

And you can do it with a clear conscience too! Little Greene’s practical and hard-wearing oil-based paints – perfect for exterior woodwork and metal work, including front doors and garden furniture – have been reformulated to give them a greener appeal. Without compromising on appearance, ease of application or durability, much of the solvent in all Little Greene oil-based paints has been replaced with naturally-occurring vegetable oils, which are both environmentally-friendly and truly sustainable.

The low-sheen oil-eggshell still has its timeless, sophisticated flat finish whilst the oil-gloss remains as brilliant as ever.

And for walls, Little Greene now makes an eco-friendly Exterior Masonry Paint specially formulated to keep your house and garden looking smart for up to 15 years.

Little Greene’s Exterior Masonry Paint is easy to apply and quick to dry. It has a smooth, matt finish that resists dirt retention, and with such a beautiful range of shades, there is a paint for walls everywhere, from townhouses to cottage gardens.

Strike while it’s hot! Consult your Little Greene colour cards today, and give your home the beauty treatment it deserves!

We’re introducing a beautiful new paint collection to complement our existing range of 128 paint shades.

The aptly-titled Colour Scales® collection is exactly that: the card combines 12 of the best-loved colours from the Little Greene ‘Colours of England’ card with lighter or darker tones of each. The result is a delightfully soft palette that offers subtle variations of shade and an incredibly easy-to-use system for harmonising and combining colours in a room: an essential card for professional designers and home-decorators alike.

Livingroom in French Grey

Hallway in Bone China Blue Paint

David, our Managing Director commented that ‘Our customers repeatedly ask for varied strengths of our colours and this comes as no surprise – the practice of using scales of tone actually has its origins firmly rooted in age-old decorating techniques.’

Contrary to popular assumption there were, historically, no such things as set colour standards, so the designers & craftsmen of yesteryear would create paint shades ‘off the cuff’ by blending raw pigments themselves. Each artisan would subsequently reduce a particular shade with white, in order to produce a personalised collection, using these ‘scaled down’ colours either as individual shades or in harmonious groups to celebrate the architectural integrity of an individual room or entire building.

Little Greene’s Colour Scales® card has been designed to make the colour selection process very straightforward. The layout of overlapping paint chips overcomes the problem of viewing a colour surrounded by bright white (often the reason a shade appears to be lighter or darker on a colour chart than when painted on a larger expanse of wall). The Colour Scales® card enables the client to choose variations in colour strength in the same way the original designers, did but without the associated hassle of ‘mixing your own’.

In keeping with our quality-assurance, all colours are available in the full range of traditional and modern paint finishes, and the chips on the Colour Scales® card are accurate samples of both colour and finish, being made from actual paint direct from a tin of environmentally-friendly Acrylic Matt Emulsion rather than in a factory-matched ink.

From the beginning of April, Colour Scales® will be available nationally and internationally through Little Greene’s network of distributors. It can also be bought via mail & phone order and online.

We had a long, fun and fruitful four days at Decorex in London at the end of last month, with our stand showing off our ‘Camellia’ wallpaper from the Oriental Papers collection – in several colourways – and the sales team enjoying everyone travelling from afar to visit them for a change..

One famous fan of Little Greene was eager to cast his eyes over an exclusive preview of our next wallpaper collection, officially being launched in January. We are, of course, assuming it’s our charming paints and wallpapers rather than one of Terry’s legendary pinstripe suits that prompted this textbook enquiry pose from the renowned impersonator.

Terry tries to make an equally good impression by kneeling down in front of Rory Bremner

So you’ve ordered your sample pot of paint and when it arrives you find a little pot of award winning marmalade in the box.

It’s not part of some big strategic marketing plan to get you to buy more paint (or marmalade). It’s not because we’re diversifying our product offering. And it’s definitely not because we got a load of cheap marmalade off the back of a lorry. No, it’s nothing more than a nice surprise and yes, it has been made in a traditional open pan on an aga cooker using locally sourced ingredients.

Suzie Rudkin of Pure Preserves won a gold for this marmalade in the Great Taste awards and we liked it so much we thought we’d find a way of sharing it with some of you.

If you’d like us to send a free sample to brighten up someone else’s day, or if  you’d like  to get hold of a full family-size jar directly from Suzie just leave a reply with your email address or phone number below (we won’t pass your details to anyone else).

Hope you like it – just don’t try spreading it on your walls!