Conran and Partners, British paper specialists GF Smith, and colour and paint experts YesColours collaborated on The Way You Make Me Feel, an immersive installation which transformed the street-facing window and lobby of Conran and Partners’ studio on Great Sutton Street into a journey through the emotional and sensory power of colour.
Taking its name from its central question, not just what a colour looks like but what it makes you feel, the installation drew on colour research and live visitor participation to demonstrate that colour is not a decorative afterthought, but a critical design tool capable of shaping mood, triggering memory, and fundamentally altering how we experience a space.
At street level, the full width of the Great Sutton Street facade is transformed by a canopy of hand-painted and colour-matched paper discs.
Every disc was chosen by a member of one of the three collaborating teams – Conran and Partners (London and Hong Kong), GF Smith, and YesColours. Each person selected two colours from the YesColours range, matched to GF Smith Colorplan paper, and paired each one with a single emotion and a personal memory.
The result is a collective portrait of colour as lived experience – visible from the street and inviting passers-by to stop, look, and feel before they have even entered the building.
Inside, the lobby becomes a colour journey through five distinct emotional stations. Each is anchored by a large sheet of colour-matched GF Smith Colorplan paper suspended from the ceiling, and a plinth painted in the corresponding YesColours shade
The five colours — Electric Yellow, Passionate Pink (Fuchsia Pink), Dirty Neutral (Chalk), Secluded Green (Mid Green), and Loving Grey (Slate) – represent a deliberately broad emotional spectrum, spanning 65 points of Light Reflectance Value from near-black to near-white.
At each station, visitors were invited to post their own reaction: a memory, a feeling, a single word. These responses accumulated across the three days of the installation, forming a live study in colour and emotion.
