How to use the colour purple in your home interiors 

We explore the history of this royal and spiritual shade and look at the many ways you can feature it in your living space

A primary yellow pops off a lavender wall and is cooled by the concrete grey brick walling and nicely worn in parquet. With the right balance in your scheming, purple doesn’t automatically have to be a colour thug. Picture: iStock

In 1856, a teenage scientist, William Henry Perkin, was mucking around with a synthetic formula for quinine — a protection from the colonial killing scourge of malaria — when he discovered a recipe for purple paint. Beneath the sun-licked waves of the Western Mediterranean, hosts of spiny dye-murex (a cannibalistic sea snail) could finally breathe a bubbling sigh of relief, having been hunted from ancient times to provide a noble, purple dye. Daubed on cave walls in a red-oxide called hematite from neolithic times, purple was not a secondary colour for human civilisations across the world.

It already had a rich, mystery to it when Perkins made his fortune-making little blunder.