House cladding colours in the UK: choosing the colour, and why the maker decides it

Every cladding brochure shows its own colours and nothing else, so the question a homeowner actually has, which colour should this house be, gets answered one supplier at a time. Put the two makers who sell fibre cement colour in the UK side by side, though, and the choice turns out to follow a running order.

• Choose the colour before the profile. Cedral Click and Cedral Lap carry the same card of 21 colours, so the board shape narrows nothing. EQUITONE is the opposite case: its ranges are different products, and the colour list moves with the range.
• Choose the maker before the wall is specified. Only four of the 21 Cedral colours have a twin at EQUITONE close enough to pass on a wall. The cross-reference table is below, with codes and hex values. Changing supplier late in a job is a change of design.
• If the house is to be dark, clad it rather than paint it. Cladding reaches #0B0B0B where the darkest British exterior paint stops at #2C2B2B.

The shelf read here is what EQUITONE and Cedral list for the UK market: nine ranges, 151 active positions, 119 published colour values, and 101 colours the eye can separate on a wall. How they were counted is at the end of the page.

Board shape is not a colour

Cedral Click and Cedral Lap carry an identical card of 21 colours. Click is a flush board with a concealed joint, Lap is the overlapping weatherboard profile, and the difference between them is how the wall reads in raking light and how it is fixed, not what colour it is. Colour SidingsC50 Black is #131314 in both.

So the sequence a lot of cladding decisions get into, picking a profile and then discovering what colours it comes in, has one step too many in it here. Pick the colour, then pick the profile, because with Cedral the profile does not narrow the colour list at all.

EQUITONE works the other way round. Its ranges are genuinely different products, not two shapes of one board: [coloura] and [natura] carry 25 colours each, [pictura] 20, [textura] 19, [linea] and [tectiva] 9 each, [lunara] 2, and much of what separates them is surface rather than pigment. Fibre cement is coloured through the board in some of these ranges and coated in others, with a sanded, ribbed or textured face, so the same value can read quite differently between two of them. Across all seven ranges, 98 values give 84 colours you can tell apart, and almost all of the small loss is inside [natura], where 25 values give 22.

Changing maker means changing colour

This is the table to keep if you are comparing quotes from two suppliers.

Of the 21 Cedral colours, only four have a twin at EQUITONE close enough that a wall would not show the difference:

Seventeen of twenty-one have nothing comparable on the other shelf. So a wall specified in a Cedral colour cannot, as a rule, be re-quoted in EQUITONE at the same colour, or the other way round. The maker is chosen before the colour, not after it, and a change of supplier late in a job is a change of design.

The dark end goes darker than paint does

Across the whole shelf, 32 values sit below a lightness of 40, giving 26 dark colours you can tell apart: roughly a quarter of the shelf is dark, which is a much higher share than an exterior paint deck carries.

They also go further down. The darkest cladding value here is EQUITONE [coloura] FCM905 at #0B0B0B, with Cedral Black at #131314 and EQUITONE [textura] TA001 Black at #1C1C1C behind it. For comparison, the darkest exterior paint value on the British paint shelf is #2C2B2B, a clear step lighter.

This is why dark houses in the UK are so often clad rather than painted. A through-coloured or factory-coated board holds a depth that a site-applied exterior paint is not formulated to reach, and holds it without the fading a very dark painted render has to live with.

On a real house

Before

After

The panels here are large format with open joints, and that is part of the colour decision rather than separate from it. At this size the wall is read as one field of colour broken by a grid of shadow lines, so a dark colour looks darker than the same value would on a narrow lap board, where every overlap catches light. It is also why the one rust-coloured panel by the door does so much work: against a plain dark field, a single board of another colour is a deliberate move rather than a pattern.

Verdict

The British fibre cement cladding shelf is 151 positions, 119 values and 101 colours you can actually separate, which is a short, working list rather than a fan deck. Two things follow from how it is built. Board shape does not decide colour, because Cedral's 21 colours are the same in Click and in Lap, so choose the colour first. Maker does decide colour, because only four of those 21 have a match at EQUITONE, so settle the supplier before the wall is specified. And if the house is meant to be genuinely dark, cladding reaches #0B0B0B where paint stops well short of it.

Pick the colour against the roof, the windows and the neighbours on a photograph of your own house, then order it by maker, range and code.

How to set it up in GetFacade

1. Upload a photo of the house as it stands, with the roof and the window frames in shot.
2. In Brands, choose cladding, then EQUITONE, then a range such as [natura], and a dark colour.
3. Make a second design with Cedral Lap at the nearest colour it carries, to see the same wall in an overlapping board.
4. Make a third with Cedral Click in that same colour: the colour will not move, the surface will, which is the comparison worth looking at.

Frequently asked questions

About the numbers. The figures come from the GetFacade catalogue as of 23 September 2026 and cover active fibre cement cladding positions listed for the UK market. Colours are counted by the value each maker publishes, not by name. Distances are CIEDE2000 computed from those values, and the 2.0 threshold is GetFacade's judgement. Ranges change, so confirm the colour reference at the time of ordering, and order a physical sample: a published value cannot show you a surface.