Grey Was Never the Absence of Colour

Vilhelm Hammershøi painted the same few rooms for most of his working life. In the flat at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen, where he lived for about a decade from 1898, he set down doors standing open onto further doors, a table against a bare wall, a woman seen from behind, and above all the light: low, grey and even, coming through the window as if through cloud. His palette was narrow, mostly greys, whites and muted browns, and in his hands grey became almost a colour of its own. What his paintings record is a northern way of seeing, in which brightness is not the same thing as light.

That sensibility outlived him. Poul Henningsen spent much of his career on lamps that would not glare, and the pale floors, limewashed walls and matt surfaces of a Copenhagen flat still do the rest. Very little in such a room is meant to flash.

Polished metal has always sat a little uneasily in that setting. When Marcel Breuer began bending steel tube into furniture at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s, chrome became shorthand for the modern interior: clean, industrial, a material that seemed to have come straight from the factory. But chrome is also a mirror. It returns the window, the lamp and the room to the eye, and it changes with every movement of the person looking at it.

The television has had an even more awkward place in the home. When sets first arrived in living rooms after the Second World War, manufacturers often disguised them as furniture, housing the screen in a wooden cabinet with doors that could be closed in the evening, so that the room looked as if nothing had changed.

The clearest answer to that came from Milan. Brionvega, a maker of radios and televisions led by the entrepreneur Giuseppe Brion, worked closely through the 1960s with two designers: the Italian architect Marco Zanuso and the German designer Richard Sapper. In 1964 they produced the Algol 11, a black and white television small enough to carry by its handle. The plastic case is only about thirty centimetres wide, the eleven inch screen fills the whole front, and the dials and aerial sit on top. A metal handle folds away into the body, and the front is tilted slightly upwards, so that the screen faces the viewer even when the set stands on the floor. Zanuso compared the pose to a dog looking up at its master. The Algol was meant to be carried from room to room and looked at as an object in its own right, and in 1970 it entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Brionvega still makes it today, with new electronics inside the original case.

Flat screens removed the cabinet but not the problem. Switched off, a television is still the largest dark surface in many rooms, a black rectangle on a wall. Pedestal, a Danish company based in Aarhus, has worked from the other end of the question, treating the stand rather than the screen as the piece of furniture. Its Moon holds the television on a steel frame drawn in soft curves, which open into two splayed legs on wheels. Like the Algol, it assumes that a screen might belong in more than one room. The Moon Tall lifts the same idea a little higher, and the Moon Light reduces it to a single welded tube.

Until now, the polished metal version of these frames has been chrome. Cloudy Silver, introduced in October 2026, takes them in a different direction: a pale, softened silver that reads as metal without behaving like a mirror. Strictly speaking the surface is not metal at all but a ceramic coating, applied in two stages and cured at very high temperature, which leaves a fine texture with a faint metallic sheen. In Pedestal's own photographs, taken in plain rooms with old windows and worn concrete floors, it picks up the grey of the daylight rather than the shapes around it. The frame recedes, and the screen it carries becomes the only strong edge in the room. It is, in a sense, a Hammershøi grey applied to steel.

Matt metallic surfaces are nothing new. Shelving, office furniture and kitchen equipment have used brushed, satin and bead-blasted metals for decades, usually because they show fewer fingerprints. What is less usual is to see the choice made for an object that tends to be judged by how well it disappears. Next to oak or pine the finish looks cool and slightly technical; against concrete or stone it almost matches; in a room with warm wood panelling it becomes the neutral element. It does not ask the rest of the room to shine.

Pedestal approaches the same object from the other side, and with less restraint. Its film Objects of Desire, shot on 16mm by the director Finn Christian Peper and released on 23 October, is the second in a series the company calls Dear Maria. In the first, a man in Athens chose his TV stand over his girlfriend. In the second, after a heartbreak, he takes the stand with him to a house on the Aegean coast and spends slow afternoons beside it at the pool, until someone else comes along and, for a while, the stand matters a little less.

Behind the film's light touch sits a fairly old truth. Most people have loved a thing, a chair that survived several moves or a coat kept long after it stopped fitting, and most would rather not say so. Hammershøi might have understood. His rooms are nearly empty of people, and those who do appear are often seen from behind. What keeps the painter company is a table, a chair, a door left open, and the grey light falling across them.

A television will never be the most beautiful thing in a room, and it does not need to be. The more interesting question is what holds it, and whether that object can live in the room on the days the screen stays dark. In Pedestal's Cloudy Silver, the answer is a piece of furniture that takes its colour from the weather outside. Whether anyone falls for it is another matter, and, as the film suggests, not always for good.

Images: Courtesy of Pedestal. Film still: Objects of Desire, directed by Finn Christian Peper, 2026.