Luxury Paint House Farrow & Ball Began as a Wartime Hustle

On the evening of Jan. 2, 2019, some 9 million people were watching Saturday Night Live when a skit called “New Paint” aired. It featured an unemployed bartender named Beth (Aidy Bryant) who boasts to her visiting brother Tom (Beck Bennett) how she’s covered her living room walls with Lulworth Blue from Farrow & Ball—“the high-end British paint company that offers unparalleled depth and colour.” A gaudy philistine, Beth pronounces the “u” in “colour” several times, then informs Tom what she spent: “A hundred and ten dollars for a can of paint?” Tom explodes. “Are you insane?” As it turned out, the final laugh in this skit belonged to Farrow & Ball, which many didn’t realize was an actual brand. Shortly after the show, the company tweeted: “It’s true, we really do offer an unparalleled depth and ‘col-our.’” And, for the record, the price is now up to $125 a gallon. For the uninitiated, Farrow & Ball is to paint what Château Latour is to Bordeaux. It’s the brand you buy when you get serious about your rooms—or want your friends to think you are. F&B paints adorn the walls of Windsor Castle, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a slew of celebrity homes. “If you can say you’ve got Farrow & Ball,” interior designer Sophie Richardson has averred, “it means you’re in with the cool club.” But what makes paint worth this kind of money? CEO Anthony Davey can count the ways: how F&B has a “curated palette” of only 132 colors; how it blends its colors by hand using China clay and chalk, even as competitors long ago turned to acrylic. But the biggest reason might well be its marketing. “We've cultivated relationships with institutions that people would look to as definers of taste,” he told Adweek. “That's also elevated how the brand is perceived.” Farrow & Ball wasn’t always a fancy name. Starting out in the economic torpor of postwar Britain, founders John Farrow and Richard Ball originally made a corrosion-resistant primer called red lead. F&B steadily expanded its color palette, but didn’t gain its posh image until 1992, when Tom Helme (adviser to Britain’s National Trust of landmarked properties) took over the company. F&B’s resulting National Trust collection of historically inspired hues dripped with authenticity, granting the brand cachet it still enjoys. Not everyone is on board with that image, however. Noted British interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has dismissed F&B paint as “the badge of the aspirational middle classes” and little more than “a marvel of branding.” Call it what you like, because the Danish manufacturing giant Hempel decided F&B was worth 500 million pounds when it bought the brand in 2021. That’s more than $636 million—or roughly 5 million cans of Lulworth Blue. Time for plan B It was a narrow miss, but Farrow & Ball was very nearly a taxicab company. When John Farrow and Richard Ball first went into business in 1946, Ball owned the rights to operate a livery company in the towns of Bournemouth and Poole in England, but the shortage of petrol stymied him. The War Office, however, did furnish the men with a large volume of flamethrower fuel. Farrow, the chemist, tried to refine it into gasoline, but got triplumbic tetroxide instead, a chemical that turned out to be a great rustproof primer and one that steered them into the paint business. As Ball’s son would later recall, “What they found turned out to be much more valuable for them both.” The colo(u)r of money Richard Ball—with wife, Edna (1)—met chemist John Farrow after World War II and started a paint business (2) after his planned taxi venture didn’t work out. The company’s early products (3) included a rust inhibitor for iron railings, but it gained a reputation for its rich color palette. Today, the paints are still mixed by hand (4) in Dorset, U.K.—one aspect that explains the paint’s high cost, which Saturday Night Live spoofed in 2019 (5).