Best Grey Coffee Makers

Grey is what a kitchen chooses when black is too heavy and steel is too cold, and it is the colour most likely to arrive looking different from the photograph. The word covers everything from pale stone to near-black charcoal.

It hides about half of what black hides

Mid grey conceals dust and dried splashes reasonably well and does nothing at all about coffee stains, which read as dark marks on a light ground. Charcoal behaves almost exactly like black. Pale grey behaves like white. Where a machine sits on the scale matters far more than the fact that its colour is called grey.

Two greys rarely match

Grey carries an undertone - blue, green or brown - that is invisible until it is next to another grey with a different one. This is the practical reason grey appliances so often look slightly wrong beside grey cabinets. If you are matching, match against a photograph in daylight, and expect a warm grey kettle to fight a cool grey worktop.

Where it is the right answer

Grey is the safest finish for a machine you expect to keep through a kitchen change, because it argues with less than any other colour here. It is also common on the plastic bodies of mid-priced drip machines, where it ages far more gracefully than black does: greying plastic that started grey simply stays grey.