Perhaps it's an ominous sign of the national mood, like the hemlines that supposedly flit up and down with the economy – but in the important arena of architectural colour schemes, things are looking decidedly grey.
And not just any grey – a particularly sombre, deep-hued grey, invoking on one hand the tonal subtlety of natural stone, and on the other the drabness of rain-soaked concrete. It crept across the palette of designers and decorators and now the nation's home-owners are catching on.
From trendy townhouses, shops and pubs in increasing numbers, the slosh of grey-loaded paintbrushes marks owners out from their Regency cream and buttery Farrow & Ball neighbours.
This grey-over is rather tasteful in some ways – compared with the dated primary colours of the city-centre property developers' boom, for instance. And as the radiant exterior of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff – clad in many hues of Welsh slate – shows, shades of grey can be beautiful.
It's most certainly an architect's colour. Brooding and expressive, grey can define a building's hulking form as emphatically as the modernists' choice for their white boxes once did. Starchitect David Adjaye can be credited with starting the trend, with his Dirty House, a great dark-grey slab of a building designed for a couple of Shoreditch artists. Casting a formidable shadow, it rather epitomises the jailhouse-landed-in-your-street look.
But therein lies the downside. It's not exactly cheery, is it? And how long can we remain excited about something that's grey?
