2025 Colour Trends for London Interiors: What's Happening in Premium Postcodes

The Data From the Walls

After several years of fielding the same requests — Elephant's Breath, Purbeck Stone, Pavilion Grey — something genuinely shifted in London's premium interiors market around 2024, and by 2025 it had become clearly established. The grey era is ending. Not with a crash, but with a gradual pivot that is accelerating noticeably, particularly in the higher-value postcodes where clients tend to set rather than follow trends.

We see it directly in the specifications we're working from: the colour cards on site visits, the conversations with interior designers we work alongside, and the paint brands whose salespeople are candid with us about what's moving. Here's an honest assessment of what's happening, and what we think it means for anyone planning a redecoration in 2025 or 2026.

The Exit From Grey

Grey was a remarkable phenomenon. It dominated UK interiors for the better part of a decade, and it made a kind of sense: it photographed well for property listings, it appealed to a broad range of tastes, and it provided a neutral backdrop that didn't commit you to a particular style. Dulux's own grey range expanded to include dozens of variants; Farrow & Ball sold more Purbeck Stone than almost anything else.

The problem with grey, as clients are now realising, is that it can make a room feel cold and flat, particularly in London's often-limited light. North-facing rooms painted in grey can feel genuinely oppressive in winter. And as grey became ubiquitous in rental properties, developer show homes, and everywhere in between, its neutrality became a liability rather than an asset — it stopped reading as a considered choice and started reading as a default.

The move away from grey has been towards two quite different directions.

Warm Neutrals: The Sophisticated Middle Ground

The first direction is warm neutrals — colours in the off-white, stone, warm beige, and warm taupe families that provide the neutrality and backdrop quality of grey, but without the cold cast. These are the colours that work year-round in London's variable light: warm enough to feel welcoming in January, restrained enough to feel fresh in July.

The leading choices we're specifying most frequently in SW1, SW3, W8, and W11:

Farrow & Ball's Joa's White and School House White — both sit in the warm white category, with just enough yellow-green or yellow in their composition to read as genuinely warm without veering towards cream.

Little Greene's Stock and Aged White — both excellent for period properties where you want a finish that looks as though it belongs, rather than having been imposed.

Edward Bulmer's Ochre White and Cuisse de Nymphe — increasingly popular with design-conscious clients, particularly those working with Georgian and Regency proportions.

Mylands' Sunglow and Ermine — Mylands has been gaining significant traction in London's premium market, offering excellent pigment depth at a price point between the mainstream and the very top of the market.

These warm neutrals work particularly well in:

• Hallways and staircases where a warm greeting is the goal
• Open-plan living and dining areas that need a cohesive, restful backdrop
• Period properties where the original plaster and timber pick up warm tones naturally

Dark Accent Rooms: Deliberate, Confident, Committed

The second direction is the opposite of neutrality: a genuine embrace of dark, rich, enveloping colour in specific rooms. This trend has been building for several years, but in 2025 it feels fully mainstream in premium London properties — if "mainstream" is even the right word for rooms painted in deep forest green, midnight navy, or deep terracotta.

The rooms being painted dark are almost always one of three types:

Studies and home offices — a deep, focussed colour in a study creates a psychological environment for concentration. We're seeing a lot of deep green (Farrow & Ball's Studio Green, Little Greene's Obsidian Green, Edward Bulmer's Bronze Green) and deep blue (Inchyra Blue, Hague Blue, Mylands' Petworth Blue) in London home offices.

Dining rooms — arguably where dark rooms have always worked best. A dining room is used in the evening, in artificial light, and for an inherently convivial purpose. A rich, dark colour creates drama and warmth. Deep reds (Preference Red, Incarnadine) and very dark greens are both popular here.

Principal bedrooms — the most recent frontier of the dark room trend. A bedroom in a deep, enveloping tone feels genuinely restful in a way that a light, neutral bedroom often doesn't. We're seeing deep blue-greens, indigos, and rich charcoals being specified for bedrooms in a way that would have felt unusual five years ago.

The common thread is commitment. These aren't rooms where the client has painted one wall as a "feature" — they're rooms where all four walls, the ceiling, and sometimes the woodwork are taken into the same dark tone. Colour drenching in dark tones creates a sense of completeness that the half-hearted single feature wall never achieves.

What's Still Working: The Enduring Choices

Not everything changes. Some colours and approaches continue to work regardless of trend cycles, and we see them specified consistently across all client demographics in premium London postcodes:

Off-white throughout — a quality off-white emulsion, properly applied, never goes out of fashion. Joa's White, James White, and Dimity from Farrow & Ball continue to appear on almost every project.

Painted joinery — the trend for painting wooden panelling, wainscoting, and skirting boards in a colour (rather than white or cream) has continued to build. Sage green, warm blue-grey, and soft terracotta panelling are all appearing with increasing frequency.

Green in general — green has had an extraordinary run and shows no signs of retreating. From very pale sage (Mizzle, Sage) to mid-tone olive (Chappell Green, Pickle) to very deep bottle green, virtually every register of green is being used. It sits well in London's particular light and works with the Victorian and Georgian brick and timber of the city's period stock.

What This Means for Your Project

If you're planning a redecoration in 2025 and you're currently thinking about grey, it's worth pausing and exploring the warm neutral alternatives — they're likely to read better in your rooms and to age better over the next five to ten years. If you've been curious about a bold, dark room, now is the moment when it's fully culturally acceptable; you won't be alone.

We're happy to advise on colour selection as part of our standard quoting and specification process. If you'd like a more in-depth colour consultation, we also offer that as a standalone service. Get in touch to discuss your project.