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Does grey and beige go together? It depends on the shade and tone of both your beige and your grey. Tone is the most important consideration here – and mixing cool with warm tones in the same design scheme results in an incongruous and disarming (and not in the good way) clash that immediately seems off kilter, even if you can’t put your finger on exactly what is off.
Beige is almost universally found in warm tones, while most of us tend to think of grey as being cool, and it is certainly true that there are far more examples of cool-toned greys out there than warm ones.
This means then that decorating with a theme that involves meaningful amounts of both grey and beige involves matching their tones to harmonise with each other, which can be really impressive if it does. Grey and beige go together in terms of the fact that they’re both neutral shades too, which means you can also add a stronger or bolder accent colour to the mix; or not, depending on your preferences.
In this blog post I’ll talk about what colour grey goes with beige, how to avoid picking a lemon, and I’ll also suggest some other colours as alternatives or additions that you might want to look at with a theme of this type too.
What colour grey goes with beige?
Beige comes in a range of shades in its own right (and I’m very much going to ignore the obvious “50 shades of grey” joke), but beige colours are all pretty much universally warm toned, and also, fairly light coloured.
This means that you really need a warm-toned grey to work with the warm tones of beige, which tends to mean picking a mid to dark-coloured grey, and as a result, accepting that the grey will be the dominant colour of the pairing.
You can of course balance this out (and most people will) by having a larger amount of beige visual real estate than grey overall; although a very bold design choice that can look great in the right hands flips this on its head, with the grey as the more widely used shade, and the beige as the accent.
Does light grey go with beige?
I’ve suggested using a middling to dark grey as your pairing with beige if that’s the path you want to go down; but does light grey go with beige, and are there some more options to play with there?
I’m certainly not saying that it would be impossible to match a light grey with beige and have it work, but I am saying that I cannot visualise (either mentally or on the swatches that I have to hand) a warm-toned grey that is a particularly light shade.
That’s not to say that one doesn’t exist, but given that I work in interiors and am forever being bombarded by new colour ranges from our fabric suppliers, if I am struggling to find one, I suspect that you will too.
Do grey and beige work together when it comes to a blinds/walls combo?
Yes, whether you’re theming the whole room in a grey and beige combo or are just looking for a couple of areas to add in a grey accent to break up the beige, grey blinds with beige walls or vice versa produces a warm, cohesive, and smart but not overly formal look.
When I have seen this done it tends to be by means of using wooden blinds, and more commonly involves grey blinds against beige walls than the other way around.
Does grey and beige go together with a bridging colour?
Using a mid to dark-coloured grey with beige can be helped along and made to look more cohesive if you’re struggling in that respect if it’s looking a bit flat if you can bridge the gap between the two colours or otherwise tie them together in an obvious way.
For instance, by using patterned cushions incorporating both colours, or having artwork that integrates or blends the two colours within the same piece.
Also, there are a handful of other shades that are very close to beige and grey respectively, which can be thrown into the mix to produce a graduated colour finish to the overall impression, and these are stone, sandstone, and ecru (quite possibly others too, but these are the ones I can come up with off the top of my head, and that aren’t so obscure as to be hard to hunt down).
Stone is generally considered to be grey with a warm undertone (just what you want to blend with beige), sandstone being more of a buttery beige/grey blend, and ecru being a greyish yellow; all of which work with both grey and beige, as well as giving you a couple of additional colour options to consider instead of grey and beige if you’re not sure if this is in fact the way forwards.
