Six colours. One board.

How dark do you want the wall to be?

This is the decision that changes the building. The six tones run continuously from Pale Oak, which blocks as a flat pale field at twenty metres, to Coffee Walnut, which blocks as a deep field and swallows the joints, the reveals and the shadow lines. Between them, Ash Silver and Golden Beech sit in the upper-middle band; Honey Teak and Smoke Grey in the middle.

The mistake that costs the most is judging a tone on a sample at arm's length. At arm's length the six look like six wood grains. At twenty metres they look like four different walls: pale, mid-light, mid-dark and dark. Look at the samples across a room before you look at them in your hand, and look at the colour pages for the two tones either side of the one you are considering.

Is the light around the building warm or cool?

The second question decides which of two similar-looking tones you should take. A low-chroma board takes its reading from its neighbours: pale render, brick and warm stone pull a grey toward cool, while blue-grey walls, zinc and glass pull a cream toward warm. That is perception rather than a product property, and it applies to real timber just as much.

Practically: if the elevation faces the sea or the sky, the cooler tones hold their character and the warm ones can pick up orange in low light. If it faces a warm render or a brick neighbour, the warm tones settle and the cool greys can look slightly clinical. If the light is flat and grey for most of the year, the mid-tones carry more than either end of the range.

The warm group

Warm-toned boards read as timber and are the reason most clients ask for a wood-effect cladding in the first place. They carry a gable end, an upper floor or a whole elevation above a light base, and they hold their warmth in the deep shade of a canopy better than the cooler tones do. The trade-off is response: they move with the colour of the light, so a warm tone beside a large cool plane will read more orange than it does on a sample. Teak is the most recorded tone group in our project file, across ten markets.

The neutral group

Neutral boards hand the elevation over to the architecture. Pale Oak is the quietest - the joints, the shadow lines and the window frames become the pattern and a single dark element carries the facade. Ash Silver is the silvered-timber grey, the lowest-chroma tone in the range and the one that changes most between sun and overcast. Smoke Grey is the warm greige that sits beside concrete and render without the joint turning into a colour event. All three are specified where the cladding should not be the subject.