Wot No Charcoal Fence Paint?! Plus, some Coral & Grey :)

It doesn’t come out very often but my FrowBrow just had a moment in my fav shop looking, looking harder and looking again for something I thought, by 2016, I’d find. We designers and interior bloggers are all about the grey and have been for a couple of years now and slowly the rest of the world is catching up. They’re all realising grey isn’t simply for saucy books and Manchester skies but is actually the new beige, a stylish alternative to Noughties oatmeal and as wonderful in a palette of variable tones as it is a classic foil to pastels or brights.

Plus, it’s not just for indoors. I’ve used it in various gardens as it provides a much more contemporary exterior backdrop than brown or red. So….. when choosing a colour to paint over graffitied hoarding for our new Baths banner, I headed to B&Q to buy some fence paint in cool charcoal. How difficult could that be? Red cedar….mahogany…. teak… golden chestnut…. brown Brown and more BROWN as far as the eye could see!

2016-01-14_0002 — Shelf upon shelf of earthy tones

But absolutely no grey. Sure there was a small amount of grey in the garden paint sections, with B&Q, Ronseal and Cuprinol all starting to introduce anthracites, pebbles or steels but these are formulations geared at sheds or furniture, rather than priced keenly and designed to cover large areas of fencing or timber walls. Guys, you are definitely missing a trick here I’m sure of it, it’d be sensible to have a least one deep charcoal option for buyers with more modern gardens, surely?

I had to plump for a paint and chose a Valspar external shade at £36 for 5L calked Inky Prose, only for the girls to mix and be too purple in tone for me to use, which you couldn’t really tell from the in-store board. Luckily there’s the option of correcting the shade to a darker one, so they altered it to Downing Street. I’ll stick to my tried and tested Evening Coat next time!

In other news there are some rather fabulous external paint colours out there and everyone seems to be getting quite adventurous for 2016. The spectacular Coral above caught my eye and yes, agreed, you’d need to be brave to go for this shade in the garden but imagine a sea of greens and whites against the palette below – gorgeous!