Expensive paint v's trade colour matched

[jengles]

Having moved into the house of yellow (literally every interior wall, enhanced by oak flooring throughout!), we're looking to re-paint throughout.

However, we can't decide whether to bite the bullet & go for F&B or Little Green Company, or save money & use colour matched paint (which we've seen promoted on Instagram/seen trade places near us that do it).

DH is concerned colour matched won't be as good quality, but as we're looking to get a painter & decorator in to do it, I wonder if there's less chance of it looking rubbish.

Any tips or experience?!

We’ve just had the whole of our downstairs painted in colour matched F&B.

Our decorator said he hoped we weren’t planning on buying F&B paint because it was a “ballache” to work with.

Would recommend Johnstone’s or Valspar.

Our decorator said the same!

Colour matching doesn’t work for F and B in my humble opinion. F and B paints have different tones in different lights, which is why they’re worth the money. No one in the trade agrees, however. They will all tell you to colour match; the decorators all seem to hate F and B. But I love it and have it everywhere.

Little Greene paints are the dogs bollocks! I love them for quality ( colour depth, true colour and ease of application) and have become a paint snob. I won't use anything else now.

I can often tell the difference between F&B and F&B colour match - and I’m hardly an expert! If you don’t want to splash out for F&B just choose a shade you like from a different range rather than try to match to a more expensive one? But if you can afford it I think it’s worth the money!

If you want to match F+B then johnstons are the place to go. Just walk in, tell them the F+B colour you want and they have the paint codes already calculated and will do them on the spot.

Before we discovered them we tried all the others (including a truely terrible couple of matches from Valspar - comically bad)

We have F+B estate emulsion on a couple of walls (the very chalky one) - never again. Looks fab when it goes up but withing days someone has touched it and the mark stays, and you cannot clean it. Johnstones cover plus is very close and doesn;t suffer with these kinds of marks so much and it can be washed.

Agree Johnstone's is best. You can scrub it then too!

We have painted with F & B. No issues at all. Is your decorator a bit crap?

All decorators say F&B is crap - usually because they can't buy it cheap but charge you more for it (like they can with trade Dulux etc).

I think the best for colour match is Johnstone's as PP have said. They're fine but really not the same as f&b. Little greene and Mylands also fab for colours.

Little greene are brilliant. Sorry but you really can tell the difference. Completely up to you whether that matters to you or not. The pigment used is what you are paying for. I personally wouldn't use colour matched paint again having experimented with it.

Here we love Benjamin Moore!