Siding and paint colours that match on the Canadian shelf

In Canada the siding goes up first and the paint comes after it: trim, soffits, fascia, the garage door, the front door, sometimes a porch ceiling. None of them arrive in the colour of the panel, so the question that ends every siding decision is the same one, and it is asked at a paint counter with a sample board in hand.

What makes the Canadian answer different from the American one is not the question, it is the shelf. Canada carries the deepest siding shelf of any market covered here, counted by number of suppliers: 1,996 active siding positions in 68 lines from 9 manufacturers, among them Gentek, Kaycan and Mitten, which the American shelf does not carry at all. Against them stand 10,243 paint positions from 5 manufacturers, one of which, Sico, is Canadian and appears on no other market page in this cluster. Stripped of duplicates that leaves 1,296 distinguishable siding colours and 9,612 distinguishable paint colours.

The answer in one line, and the catch inside it

Compare the two shelves properly and almost every panel finds its paint. Of the 1,296 siding colours, 1,078 have a match at two suppliers or more, 139 at exactly one, and 79 at none.

The catch is in the middle number. When the twin exists at exactly one manufacturer, the colour decision has quietly become a supplier decision: pick Gentek Marine Dusk and the only paint that lands on it is Sico 6021-83 Lunar Landscape, so the trim is going to be Sico, whatever your painter usually buys. Same for Gentek Meadow Fern, which only Farrow & Ball reaches, and for Mitten Indigo, which only Behr does. That is 139 colours where the fandeck chooses itself.

Where suppliers do compete, they do not compete evenly. Counted across all 1,296 colours: Benjamin Moore reaches 988, Behr 962, Sherwin-Williams 852, Sico 794, Farrow & Ball 239. Farrow & Ball is not weaker paint. It is a short deck: a curated few hundred colours cannot cover a shelf built by nine siding makers, and on the four rows where it wins it wins outright.

The 79 colours with no paint twin at all are not scattered randomly either. They sit in grey (16), brown (16), blue (14), red (13), green (8), beige (6), black (5), white (1), and reading the misses one by one, most of them are dark. Mitten Black is published as a true #000000; the darkest paint on the Canadian shelf is Benjamin Moore PM-9 Black at #2B2C2D, which is a long way off in a way you would see on a fascia board. Mitten Teak and Burnt Sienna, and Gentek Snow White at the other end, fail the same way: the panel sits past the end of the paint deck, not somewhere inside it that nobody happened to fill.

How these matches were calculated, and where they stop

Every pairing below comes from a colour-difference calculation (CIEDE2000) over the measured values both catalogues publish, not from someone holding two samples up to a window. Three rules are built into what you see.

Words, not scores. Each pairing is labelled in plain language. A match can hold its lightness perfectly while its hue drifts, and that is exactly the case your eye catches on a wall, so where it happens, that is what the words say, rather than a small number that hides it.

Only colours somebody measured. Where a manufacturer publishes no colour value, there is nothing to compare and the position is left out rather than guessed at.

A value is not a surface. Paint on smooth trim and colour on textured lap siding never read identically, even at a perfect numeric match, because texture changes how light leaves the surface. These matches get you to the right two or three chips to order. They do not replace ordering them.

Gentek Sequoia Select matched to paint

Mitten Sentry matched to paint

Kaycan DaVinci matched to paint

What to do with the three cases

Twin at several suppliers. Take the two closest chips, buy sample pots of both and paint them onto offcuts, not onto the wall. Judge them beside a real panel outdoors, once in morning light and once with the sun off the elevation. Buy from whichever supplier your painter already has an account with, because at this closeness nothing else separates them.

Twin at exactly one supplier. Decide, before you order, which of the two you care about more: the colour or the fandeck. If the fandeck is fixed, because a painter buys from one counter or the rest of the house is already in one deck, then go back and move the siding colour one step instead. It is far cheaper to move a panel choice on a screen than to discover on delivery day that the trim colour has to come from a brand nobody nearby stocks.

No twin at all. This is the dark end of the shelf and the honest advice is not to chase the value. A near-black panel with a near-black trim that is measurably lighter reads as a mistake, not as a match; deliberate contrast reads as a decision. Choose the trim to contrast on purpose, or accept the closest paint knowing the difference will show, but do not pretend the deck goes somewhere it does not.

Before

After

Related guides

• Siding colors matched to paint: the same comparison on the American shelf, where the siding lines and the paint decks are different ones.
• Why your siding color looks different from the sample: why the panel on the wall never matches the chip in your hand.
• How to choose an exterior paint color: the method behind the pairing, including which colour goes where.
• Siding and paint colors: pick, match and price them: the overview that ties this cluster together.

Frequently asked questions