SOLID WOOD KITCHEN CABINETS BLOG

The popularity of grey in interior design has accelerated over the past few years. A strong neutral, grey has shaken off the tags of ‘gloomy’ ‘stormy’ and ‘dull’ and is now readily associated with cool glamour, cutting-edge style, and refinement. As American designer Bex Hale comments, grey is ‘the little black dress of décor. Dress it up, dress it down – it’s my go-to colour.’ Indeed some would argue that grey has replaced beige as the most on-trend neutral colour.

Picking the right grey for your space can be tricky, though; it varies widely from shade to shade. Achromatic or ‘true’ grey is a combination of white and black, with equal values of red, green and blue and no obvious additional tonality. Pure grey is not hugely common in decorating as we tend to prefer grey with hints of another colour (which can be more readily incorporated within a design scheme). Alterations to the RGB colour model help achieve this type of grey, creating slight but valuable variations in the shade achieved and thus producing a multitude of potential off-grey shades. These variations can be cool (greys that include less red and therefore appear to have blue, purple or green tinges) or warm (greys that include greater proportions of red and thus look pinky, brown or even yellow).

Farrow & Ball’s Charleston Gray, a smoky shade with hints of brown and purple, is both warm and cool depending on the light – the best of both worlds! At certain times of the day, this shade can graduate from cool chocolate, to almost olive, to a luxuriously rich grey with brown overtones. There are two additional points that make this shade a real winner for kitchen décor and September’s Colour of the Month: it can be paired with a huge variety of colours, from rose to citrus to paler, green-blue greys, and it is found regularly in nature – stones, birds, and even shades of earth match well with this colour – so works wonderfully with kitchen furniture made from natural materials. We recommend pairing solid oak doors handpainted in Charleston Gray with a solid oak or maple worktop for a soft yet elegant kitchen look.