This simile pleases me because I have an attachment to the colours used in eighteenth century interiors, and the kind of names given to those hues by paint companies and others.  Here I imagine a dove-grey-white shade, with perhaps a touch of duck-egg blue.

‘… a sky as pale as an eighteenth century ceiling.’

See also the quote rich mosaic review of this magnificent, entrancing book: a love letter to islands and a paean to the sea. 

Source: Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life (London: Harper Collins, 2013 (2002)), p. 77