House sale brochures now regularly list that a room has been “painted with Farrow & Ball” so successful has the British brand being in establishing a firm, widely recognised image.
It’s shorthand for expensive and classy and a hint that the owners have an appealing appreciation for that more malleable of concepts ,“heritage”. It has been such a clever marketing story it’s easy to assume it was conjured out of thin air in recent years by some brand whizz. In fact, it is a very old brand and there was a John Farrow and a Richard Ball.
They established their paint company in Dorset in 1946 and they were successful in snagging big commercial contracts including Ford Motor Cars and Raleigh bikes.
The company was old in the 1960s but it became the covetable brand it is now when it was taken over in 1992 by Tom Helme and Martin Ephson. They were hugely successful in developing the name, including creating a range of UK National Trust Paints which became instantly popular with owners of period houses.
Other paint brands have quickly caught up in terms of their colour palettes but still it’s F&B that has the name-check cachet. When they came to sell Farrow & Ball in 2006, the sale was worth about €100 million. As well as its muted colours made from natural pigments, F&B has become known for its quirky paint names: “Elephant’s Breath” (not to be confused with the browner shade of grey, “Mole’s Breath”), “Stiffkey Blue” (after a beach in Dorset) and “Dead Salmon” (the dead, reassuringly, referring to the flat paint finish, not a lifeless fish).
