Why we chaps hate the posh paint women love

As Farrow & Ball is forced to change its formula to make it easier to apply...

The Farrow & Ball balloon has burst at last — and what a relief.

No, we’re not yet witnessing a fatal crash landing of this modern corporate phenomenon but, rather, the enjoyable public spectacle of a paint company — whose very name has entered the lexicon as a statement about class, style and paying way above the odds — being forced to admit that, well, it doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin.

For years, decorators and interior designers have winced whenever their clients have produced a Farrow & Ball colour chart and started deliberating over whether to have Middleton Pink in Sophie’s bedroom, Cooking Apple Green in Michael’s study and elephant’s Breath in the drawing room. And they’ve winced for good reason. After all, they’ve been moaning about Farrow & Ball’s finish and how difficult it is to apply, for decades, with some opting to charge their customers extra or, in extremis, refusing to work with the product at all.

Now, finally, the company — which for 70 years has prided itself on offering deluxe paint ‘brimming with only the finest ingredients’ — has caved in and been forced to change its formula, adding up to 20 per cent more pigment to make the paint more opaque and, therefore, easier to apply.

‘We have added more pigment to our paints to improve coverage and opacity,’ said Gareth hayfield, Farrow & Ball’s head of research and technical developments.

‘Darker paints tend to have very good opacity. It is mainly the whites and lighter shades where the most pigment has been added. We are constantly looking at what customers want and we take feedback from all different markets in which we operate.’

excellent. So, here’s some feedback from me. It comes from someone’s who’s spent more time in Farrow & Ball’s flagship shop in London’s Fulham Road than he cares to remember; someone who’s bought so many little sample pots (at £4.50 a pop) that, for the money spent on them, he’s convinced he could have decorated his entire terraced house twice over using good old Dulux.

Someone who is immediately suspicious when hearing that an old boozer in the middle of the countryside is now ‘ simply marvellous’ just because the owners have given it the full ‘Farrow & Ball treatment’.

The truth is that sometimes I feel there are three of us in our marriage — me, my wife, Joanna, and the Farrow & Ball colour chart that lives in the top drawer of the bedside table on her side of the bed, in a way that the Gideon Bible often used to occupy a similar position in old-fashioned hotels. JoANNA

thinks the ‘F&B’ palette is so imaginative and the finish (even if it requires three coats and a hideous scene with the Polish decorators, who can’t quite believe how gullible we have become) so gorgeous that it’s worth paying nearly triple compared with a pot of Crown emulsion from B&Q.

She won’t admit this, but I also suspect that my wife is taken with the exotic names of the paints in the same way that I find them irritating.

Peignoir? What colour is that supposed to be, so named after the French word peigner, which refers to a woman combing her hair while wearing a long outer garment made of chiffon?

Mole’s Breath? Well, that could be anything once you’ve convinced yourself that a mole’s breath actually has a particular colour in the first place.

Then there’s Pelt, a sort of mauve; Clunch, an off-white (sorry, orf-white) that was all the rage until a few years ago; and Mouse’s Back, which is a rather more pleasant colour than the mice which scurry around our kitchen when they think we’re not watching.

All very posh and all very clever marketing from a company that was founded in 1946 by a Mr Farrow (a trained chemist) and a Mr Ball (an engineer and former prisoner of war). They met at a local clay pit, opened their first paint factory in Verwood, Dorset, and began supplying the likes of the Ford Motor Company and Raleigh bicycles.

They ran a respectable business that had its ups and downs, but it wasn’t until the early Nineties that the merits of Farrow & Ball became a staple of dinner-party conversation, along with the value of property prices and how to get the children extra tuition to help with their sums.

That was when two former public schoolboys — designer Tom helme and corporate financier Martin ephson — bought the company and forged a timely partnership with the National Trust, before going it alone with hugely successful results.

In 1992, Farrow & Ball was selling around £800,000 worth of paint a year. Now, it does that in less than a week, with 62 showrooms (31 in the UK) around the world.

It recently added a selection of hand-crafted wallpapers, including three that were launched only last week, all with suitably refined names: Atacama (after the desert in Chile); helleborus (the plant); and hegemone ( the Greek goddess). helme & ephson have, inevitably, ridden off into a glorious financial sunset, having sold the company three years ago to private equity fund Ares Management.

In the process, they’ve inspired a whole raft of new paint companies, such as Little Greene, Anni Sloan (naturally) and Craig and Rose, which are all potential competitors but have got some catching up to do. No

SURPRISe, either, that the likes of Fired earth, Sanderson and Designers Guild produce a range of ‘bespoke’ paints at super-inflated prices. Farrow & Ball hasn’t just produced paint, it’s created an entire market.

What I’ve tried telling my wife — with no success whatsoever — is that F&B has become yet another middle- class conceit, similar to crushed avocado with pomegranates, Aperol with a dash of prosecco and villa holidays on the northeastern coast of Corfu.

All lovely in their own way, but ruinously expensive and with more than a smear of F&B’s Pavilion Gray uniformity about them.

What I’ve also tried telling her, with equally failing results, is that she should do what many other, more savvy, shoppers do, which is to buy a Farrow & Ball tester pot and then hop along to homebase or similar and get them to colour-match it for a much lower price. Should we ever come to sell the house, it would not then be strictly true to tell potential buyers that all the rooms are kitted out in ‘fabulous’ F&B colours, but it would be a whole lot easier on my wallet in the short term.

A five-litre pot of Farrow & Ball off-white emulsion costs £74.50, whereas five litres of off-white Dulux at homebase is £26.

To be fair, one of the reasons decorators have been complaining about the difficulty of applying F&B paint is because the company stopped producing oil-based products in 2010, when it switched to thinner, more environmentally friendly, water-based concoctions — which are widespread in the U.S., where oil-based paints hardly exist at all.

The problem is that a waterbased eggshell finish is nothing like as subtle as an oil-based equivalent and — as I keep telling my wife — does not last as long.

But, of course, that’s half the point, because after a year or two, it gives her a perfect reason to suggest yet another Saturday afternoon outing to Farrow & Ball’s Fulham Road branch.

That’s where the well-spoken slip of a girl brandishing an array of paint-boards will greet us like manna from heaven and even suggest a home visit from one of the in-store advisers.

No, thank you.