Grey and black masonry paint in the UK: which shade to pick
Most British exterior decisions come down to a grey for the walls and something close to black for the door, the frames and the rainwater goods. The hard part is not finding a grey. It is that the deck at the merchant's counter offers what feels like a hundred of them, and nobody behind it will tell you which ones are the same colour once they are on a wall.
Three things settle the choice.
- A grey is chosen by lightness, not by name. The four lightness bands are in the table further down, with how many genuinely different colours each one holds.
- In the pale band, names stop meaning anything. Eleven names from five suppliers land on one wall colour; they are listed by brand and code, so you can order the cheapest of them.
- There is no deep black. The darkest exterior value on the British shelf is
#2C2B2B. What separates the near-blacks is undertone against your brick, and the codes are below.
The shelf read here is the exterior ranges five suppliers list for the UK market: Dulux Trade UK, Jotun, Crown, Farrow & Ball and Armstead, 2,708 active positions. How they were counted is at the end of the page.
Which grey: pick the band first
The UK shelf holds 393 grey values, and 182 greys you could actually tell apart on a wall. Which of the 182 you want is a question of how dark the wall should sit against your roof, so start with the band and leave the name until last.
By supplier, the grey positions fall out as Jotun 197, Dulux Trade UK 157, Crown 49, Farrow & Ball 27, Armstead 13. Farrow & Ball is not short of grey by accident: a curated deck is meant to be short, and a deck of a few dozen greys, each earning its place, is a different product from a thousand-swatch trade fan.
The collapse is not even across the range. Split by lightness:
| Grey band | Colour values | Colours you can tell apart |
|---|---|---|
| Charcoal (L* 20 to 40) | 39 | 30 |
| Mid grey (L* 40 to 60) | 89 | 51 |
| Light grey (L* 60 to 75) | 80 | 45 |
| Pale grey (L* 75 to 88) | 185 | 60 |
Nearly half of all British greys sit in the palest band, and that is exactly where they stop being separate colours. In the charcoals, roughly three in four values survive as their own colour. In the pale greys, fewer than one in three.
One example from that band. Jotun 12314 Grey Touch is a soft pale grey. Within a distance of 1.5, which is below what the eye resolves on a wall, sit ten more values from all five suppliers: Farrow & Ball No. 274 Ammonite, Jotun 0121 Pearl, 12309 Mysterious Grey, 2105 Linen Grey and 12310 Chiffon Grey, Dulux Trade Portland, Gentle Moon, Quartz Grey and Pebble Shore, Armstead Portland and Crown 1421 Snowfall. Eleven names, five brands, one wall colour. Agonising over which of them is right is time spent on a difference that will not exist once the scaffolding comes down.
Which black: five dark colours, two of them neutral
At the darker end, counting every value below a lightness of 20, the shelf holds seven, which collapse to five you can tell apart. All seven are Dulux Trade UK, with one Armstead value landing on the same colour.
Read them one at a time and the number gets smaller again. Only two are neutral black: Rich Black at #2C2B2B and Ebony Forest at #2D2D2D, which Armstead also carries as BLACK. The other five are dark colours that read as black from the road but are not: Brazilian Rosewood, Antique Rosewood and Dark Maple are very dark browns, Rich Blueberry and Natural Breeze very dark blues.
And none of them is black the way a phone screen is black. The darkest exterior value on the British shelf is #2C2B2B. Farrow & Ball Pitch Black, the name most likely to come up in a conversation about black houses, sits at #3B3938, lighter still, and Crown Black at #393939, Armstead RAVEN at #333A3E and Dulux Ebony at #39332F fill the same narrow step. There is no deeper option to find, because exterior paint is not made that dark: a true black wall in full sun is a heat and fading problem, not a colour problem.
So "which black" is not a choice between many blacks. It is a choice between about half a dozen very dark colours, and what actually separates them is undertone, brown, blue, green or neutral, which shows up against your brick and your roof rather than on the chip.
On a real house
This pair shows why the grey question is rarely settled on the wall alone. The wall here is one pale value, and swapping it for any of a dozen neighbours on the fan deck would not change the photograph. What makes the house read as grey is the roof, the window frames and the rainwater goods, all sitting in the charcoal band, against a wall light enough to make them look almost black.
That is the relationship worth testing before you buy anything: not the grey by itself, but the grey against the roof you already have.
Verdict
Of the 393 grey values on the British exterior paint shelf, 182 are different colours on a wall, and almost all of the losses are at the pale end, where 185 values come down to 60. At the other end there are five near-blacks, of which two are neutral, and nothing darker than #2C2B2B exists to be found.
So the two decisions work differently. Black is chosen by name and code, because the field is small and the difference between the options is undertone. Grey is chosen by lightness first, how dark it should sit against your roof and frames, and only then by name, because within a band the names are mostly interchangeable. Settle the lightness on a photograph of your own house, then write down the brand, the code and the name, and order from that.
How to set it up in GetFacade
- Upload a photo of your house as it stands, with the existing roof in frame.
- In Brands, choose paint, then Dulux Trade UK, and the darkest value in the deck for the trim or the door.
- Add a second design with Jotun at the nearest grey to it, and a third with a mid grey at L* 40 to 60 on the walls.
- Compare the three side by side against your own roof, then order by brand, code and name.
Frequently asked questions
About the numbers. Sandtex and Weathershield are what you will see on a merchant's shelf, but the catalogue holds their ranges under their parent brands, so no separate figure is claimed for them. The ranges are also not split into masonry and wood-and-metal: these are the exterior colours on the British shelf, and not every one of them is sold as a masonry finish, so check the product and not just the colour before ordering. The figures come from the GetFacade catalogue as of 23 September 2026 and cover active exterior paint positions listed for the UK market. Colours are counted by the value each maker publishes, not by name, and wood-only ranges are excluded. Distances are CIEDE2000 computed from those values; the 2.0 threshold is GetFacade's judgement. Grey is taken as CIELAB chroma below 6 at a lightness of 20 to 88, near-black as a lightness below 20. Decks change, so confirm the code at the time of ordering.