This is a question we get asked surprisingly often, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a diplomatic one. Farrow and Ball vs Dulux for kitchen cabinet paint is partly a genuine performance question, partly a colour question, and partly a budget question. We’ve used both on kitchen surfaces, and here’s our actual view.
The Price Difference Is Significant
Farrow and Ball paints typically cost three to four times more per litre than Dulux equivalents. For a full kitchen cabinet repaint — where you’ll need a meaningful volume of paint — this is a real, substantial cost difference rather than a rounding error. We want to acknowledge this upfront because pretending the prices are comparable would be misleading.
Where Farrow and Ball Genuinely Earns Its Premium
The colours. Farrow and Ball’s colour palette has a depth and complexity — particularly in their mid-tones and off-whites — that’s genuinely difficult to replicate with standard Dulux tinting. The pigments used create an appearance under natural light that shifts subtly as the day progresses, which is part of what makes their colours feel particularly considered and expensive. If you’re trying to achieve a specific Farrow and Ball shade because you’ve fallen for it in someone’s kitchen, there’s genuinely no perfect budget substitute — a Dulux colour-matched version will be close but rarely identical.
Where Dulux Is the Better Choice
For pure durability in a kitchen context, the gap between Farrow and Ball and a quality Dulux kitchen-specific product is smaller than the price difference would suggest. Dulux’s Kitchen Matt and similar kitchen-formulated ranges are designed for exactly the humid, heavily-used environment of a kitchen, and they perform genuinely well. For a standard white, cream, or off-white — where the subtle colour depth argument matters less — Dulux delivers a very good result for significantly less money.
Our Honest View
We’d choose Farrow and Ball for cabinets specifically when the colour is the primary driver and there’s a shade they offer that we genuinely can’t get elsewhere. For everything else — particularly standard whites, neutral greys, and any shade where a Dulux version is genuinely close to what we want — we’d use Dulux and put the saved budget toward better preparation materials or a professional application that will make either paint look better than a rushed DIY job. The best finish for kitchen cabinets comes from the preparation as much as the paint itself, as we cover in our guide on how to get a smooth finish on kitchen cabinets.
One Practical Middle Ground
If you love a specific Farrow and Ball colour but not the price, it’s worth asking your local independent paint shop to attempt a colour match in a Dulux or similar product. The result won’t be perfect, as we mentioned above, but for some shades — particularly stronger, deeper colours — the match can be close enough to be a genuine saving. For the nuanced off-whites and mid-tones Farrow and Ball are best known for, the match tends to be less convincing.