Grey is out. Here's what's in.

Grey is over. Cool grey walls, grey-washed floors, grey-and-white kitchens — that was roughly 2014 to 2020, it was everywhere, and it is now the clearest date stamp you can put on a house. Walk into a grey kitchen today and you do not think neutral. You think last renovation.

That is not a judgement. It was fine, and I built a lot of it. A look just stops being invisible once enough people have it, and grey passed that point some years ago. The more useful question is the one everybody actually asks me next, usually about ninety seconds into a first walkthrough: so what is in?

Warm neutrals, not cool ones

The whole palette moved from cool to warm, and it is not close. Tan, khaki, sand, mushroom, greige with real warmth in it rather than a grey pretending. The National Kitchen & Bath Association puts the share of designers now favouring warm neutrals at 96 per cent.

The distinction that matters is undertone, and it is the thing people get wrong. A cool greige has blue or violet sitting under it. A warm one has yellow or red. They look nearly identical on a chip in the store and nothing alike on a wall, which is why so many "warm" repaints come out looking like the grey the owner was trying to get away from.

The colours, by name

The paint companies have given the specific answer, and both went the same direction.

Sherwin-Williams named Universal Khaki SW 6150 its 2026 Colour of the Year — a warm, earthy mid-tone neutral with a slight yellow undertone, under a forecast they call Tailored & Timeless. Benjamin Moore chose Silhouette AF-655, a burnt umber with charcoal in it — deep, brown-based, and at an LRV around 10 genuinely dark.

Khaki and brown. Not a grey between them.

Those two are doing different jobs and it is worth being clear about which is which. Universal Khaki is a whole-house colour — it will take a great room, a hallway, an exterior. Silhouette is an accent: a study, a powder room, a set of cabinets, a front door. People see "colour of the year" and paint the main living space in the dark one, then wonder why the room closed in on them. In a house with the glazing we build here, a dark brown across a big south-facing room fights the daylight it was designed to collect.

White walls, wood floors, white baseboards

The other half of the shift is that everything got cleaner, and this is the part clients describe to me most often without knowing the vocabulary for it. They say they want it to feel fresh, or not so heavy. What they are describing is this.

Walls back to white and off-white. Baseboards, casings and trim white again, rather than the tone-on-tone grey of the last decade. Floors in real wood tones — white oak, mostly — instead of the grey-washed plank that was the default for years.

It does something practical beyond looking current. A clean envelope lets the expensive things be the thing you notice: the stone, the cabinetry, the beams, the view out the back. A moody grey-on-grey room competes with its own contents, which is a strange outcome when the contents are where the budget went.

Houzz's 2026 kitchen study has the number that makes it concrete — wood finishes overtook white, 29 per cent to 28 per cent. That is the first time white has not led. A decade of all-white kitchens did not end because white got worse. It ended because wood stopped feeling like a compromise.

If you want to see the version of this we actually build rather than the version in a mood board, it is most of what is in our recent projects.

Why it works here

Warm neutrals land better in the Coachella Valley than they do almost anywhere, and it is worth understanding why, because it changes what you should do with them.

Our light is intense, high and warm, and there is a great deal of it. Cool grey always fought that a little — particularly in west-facing rooms taking the full afternoon, where a grey wall goes flat and slightly dead by four o'clock. Warm neutrals absorb that same light and hold their colour through the day instead of collapsing under it.

What the surfaces did

The hard surfaces followed the paint, which is the usual order — the palette moves first, the manufacturers retool after. Counters went to warm grounds with soft, low-contrast veining. Cabinetry went to white oak in a slim shaker. Outside, sand and buff pavers replaced cool grey. Each of those is a decision in its own right, and each gets its own piece here.

Choosing without guessing

Three things I would tell anyone starting selections.

Pick the floor first, then the walls. Flooring has the fewest options and the least flexibility, and it occupies more visual area than anything else. Choosing a wall colour and then hunting for a floor to match it is doing the hard problem second.

Decide the undertone once and hold it. Most palettes that go wrong are not wrong colour by colour — they are two warm things and one cool thing that nobody caught. Put every sample on the same table in the same light and look at them as a group before anything is ordered.

Get the selections done before the work starts. On a custom home especially, a colour decision made under time pressure in week nine is how people end up with a house they are slightly unhappy with for a decade. We front-load this deliberately — it is a large part of what the design phase is for, and how a project runs from first walkthrough onward is built around having those answers early.

Where to spend on a trend

One caution, because it should change how you budget.

This turns over roughly every ten years, and it has for as long as I have been building. Travertine and tuscan browns. Then espresso cabinets and dark granite. Then grey everything. Now warm woods and white walls. Each one felt permanent while it was happening. Each one dated on schedule, and the one arriving now will date too, around 2035.

So split the decision. The expensive, disruptive things — layout, plumbing locations, window openings, cabinet boxes, flooring — get chosen for how the house actually works, because you will not redo them in ten years. The easy things — paint, hardware, light fittings, backsplash, stools — are where a trend belongs. Repainting and swapping pulls in 2035 is a weekend. Replacing cabinet boxes because a door profile dated is a different conversation.

And if you love grey, have grey. I would rather build something a client actually wants than something that photographs well for a year. If you are working out where to land, tell us about the project and we will walk the space and get specific about it.