Madder was built by Benjamin Winship, architect, artist, and principal of Winship/Workshop, out of a specific frustration: color decisions are one of the most consequential choices a homeowner makes, and most people make them with almost no support.
The paint chip wall at a hardware store offers thousands of options and zero guidance. Online tools offer endless swatches but no point of view. And hiring a designer (the right answer) isn't accessible to everyone at every stage.
Madder sits in the gap. It is a first step: a curated set of palettes composed with architectural intelligence, historical grounding, and a designer's point of view. It does not replace a designer. It gives you the confidence to approach one with direction, or to proceed on your own with something more than a guess.
Madder is not a visualization tool. It doesn't render your room or simulate paint on a wall. It doesn't replace the judgment of a designer or the irreplaceable act of sampling colors in your specific light.
What it does is give you a starting point that is architecturally coherent. Every palette was composed for a specific house type, considering the proportions, materials, light quality, and regional character of that architecture. The colors were not chosen because they look good on a screen. They were chosen because they belong together in a room of that character.
The goal is confidence. A homeowner who arrives at a paint store or a design consultation with a Madder palette has already made a considered decision. They understand why the colors work together. They know what materials and lighting the palette requires. They have a point of view, and a point of view is the beginning of everything.
Two paths in. One outcome: a palette composed for your home, with the reasoning and specification to back it up.
Every palette in the Madder library is grounded in architectural and material history. The 12 house types span the Georgian period through the 20th century, each with a documented lineage of designers, builders, and regional traditions that shaped how color was understood and used.
The palettes are not historical recreations. They are modern interpretations, composed for contemporary use within each architectural character. A Traditional palette draws on Georgian and Federal color logic but is calibrated for today's materials, lighting, and paints. A Craftsman palette understands what Stickley and Morris were doing with earth pigments and botanical color without asking you to live in a museum.
The image upload path surfaces this history directly: after extracting your colors, Madder identifies the historical pigment tradition closest to your palette: a documented era, material, and interior that shares the same color logic.
Upload any image: a room you love, a painting, a piece of fabric, a travel photograph. The tool works best with images that have clear color character rather than very dark or blown-out photographs.
Note: the image tool surfaces palettes that share the same color temperature and register as your image. It does not guarantee an exact visual match. Color relationships in rooms depend on light, material, and scale in ways no tool can fully predict. Use it as a starting point, not a verdict.
She Moves in Her Own Way. Contemporary / Reduced. An example of what Standard unlocks.