With the pronouncement of “Living Coral” as the 2019 ‘Color of the Year’ by a certain color marketing firm came the usual flurry across social media and beyond of image after image after image of products, including rugs and carpets, exhibiting the hue. Each of them, to quote Pantone, “emit the desired, familiar, and energizing aspects of [a] color found in nature. In its glorious, yet unfortunately more elusive, display beneath the sea, this vivifying and effervescent color mesmerizes the eye and mind.
Lying at the center of our naturally vivid and chromatic ecosystem, ‘Living Coral’ is evocative of how coral reefs provide shelter to a diverse kaleidoscope of color.”
“I'm really into the Tom Ford lipsticks. I was always afraid to wear lip color because I thought it made me look too masculine, but my makeup artist Fiona Stiles got me into wearing coral, orange-y colors from his line, and now I wear lipstick all of the time.“ — Actress Nikki Reed
This last idea, how we must work symbiotically with each other, could apply nowhere more accurately than to the design and coloration of beautiful rugs and carpets, and to indeed interiors in general. It is rare for a carpet to stand proud, to excel, to garner accolades simply by relying on just one color. Rather it is the cacophony of all color winnowed to a discrete and harmonious palette that elevates a rug from ordinary to extraordinary.
Colors also tend, over time, to develop iconic complementary pairings. Coral—or pink, to use a less nuanced adjective—was and remains a fine companion to grey, as evidenced by countless Mid-Century praise-worthy examples. As such, “In Living Coral” presents carpets in the namesake hue matched with a well-loved and waning trend, grey, to remind us that the best use of rugs, the best interiors, result from incorporating the past with the future, the old with the new, the vivid with the neutral.
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“People think that everyone wears black in France; in fact they all wear grey.“ — Designer Jean Paul Gaultier
