Make the perfect setting for grey patio furniture

Charcoal grey and misty grey, anthracite grey and the palest dove grey, everyone wants grey patio furniture. Because greys never clash with each other – or with anything else – the colour does a lot of the hard garden decor work for you. You can buy pieces in multiple greys and it’ll all blend together well from the offset, or stick to the same grey. Either way it looks great. So what about the setting? Can you take the grey theme further to make the place you eat, drink and get merry feel like an outdoor room, something extra-special? It’s a yes!

How to design a garden around grey patio furniture

Outdoor masonry paint is your best friend in the garden. It’s designed for stone and concrete but also works great on all sorts of other surfaces. The Dulux range, for example, offers hundreds of colours including a plethora of greys; blue-greys, green-greys, purple-greys, warm and cool, pale and dark.

Check them out digitally using the Dulux Visualizer App to browse 384 colours laid out in families. You can order test pots through the app too. Their ‘find a colour‘ website pages are great too. Or go to a Dulux Decorators Centre branch to see the colours in real life. But this is the one that gets our pulse racing… the in-store Dulux Colour Match service uses a high tech Colour Trade Sensor to match the colour of any item you want. Bring along a cushion from your garden furniture and they’ll mix the paint for a perfect match. A scrap of fabric, a stone, a piece of old slate tile, whatever grey you want they’ll make it for you.

Minimal preparation makes masonry paint a pleasure to use, an easy job as long as you’re not a total paintbrush nightmare. It dries fast and sticks to all sorts of surfaces for a long-lasting look you can easily touch up with leftover paint. Instant results: that’s what we like! Wood stain isn’t exactly rocket science either, another quick win for instant gorgeousness.

The grey effect

So what does grey do in the garden, how does it work visually? We already mentioned it doesn’t clash with anything, showcasing greenery and flowers beautifully. But there’s more. The shade has a profound effect on our perceptions, conscious or unconscious. Just like indoors, a dark shade of grey makes a space feel darker and bigger while a pale shade makes it feel lighter and smaller. Painting the walls of a tiny city patio dark grey will open the space up, add drama and create a dusky intimacy. Painting them pale grey brings the walls closer while flooding the space with light.

You could even paint a north facing wall light grey and a sunlit wall dark grey, playing with the way our brains experience light and dark. The beauty of paint is the low cost and the fact it’s so easy to paint over when you fancy a change.

Things to paint

To pull everything together into one tasteful, cohesive design get busy with masonry paint and grey wood /decking stain in shades matching or complementing the grey outdoor furniture you’ve got your eye on. Use two or three different greys if you like.

• Pottery, stone and concrete planters / plant pots
• The stone, concrete or brick walls surrounding your patio
• Walls edging and enclosing the flowerbeds
• Wooden garden fences
• Faded wooden garden furniture
• The shed – which can so easily be an eyesore!
• Wooden exterior doors
• Decking
• Outdoor steps and bannisters

Go the whole hog with special grey exterior floor paint, especially handy when you’ve got awful old crazy paving or ugly paving slabs to cover up. Valspar’s grey porch, floor and patio anti-skid latex paint is a good example, an instant way to give tatty patios a fresh contemporary face.

Whether you’ve decided to go for matching or complementary greys, you can easily unify the whole look with matching throws and fleeces, cushions and napkins, trays and crockery, floaty sheer fabric panels, garden candles, bunting and LED lights.