How do I match an existing brick?

Brick matching goes wrong because people start with colour, which is both the hardest thing to match and the thing that changes most as new brickwork weathers. A slightly different colour that gauges correctly and has the right face texture disappears within a few years. A brick that is the right colour but 10mm shorter than the original never stops being obvious.

Step by step

1. Take a whole brick, not a photograph.Find one you can remove — from a garden wall, an outbuilding, a hidden return, or from behind where the new work is going. A physical sample is worth any number of pictures, because colour photographs badly and texture does not photograph at all.
2. Measure it precisely.Length, width and depth in millimetres. Metric standard is 215 x 102.5 x 65. Anything else is imperial or non-standard, and it changes the course gauge — a 68mm brick in a 65mm wall throws the coursing out within a few courses.
3. Work out the coursing from the wall itself.Measure four courses of existing brickwork including joints and divide by four. That figure, not the brick dimension alone, is what the new work has to match, because it includes the historic joint thickness.
4. Identify the manufacturing method.Sharp arrises and wire-drag marks mean wirecut. A creased, folded face and a frog mean soft mud or stock. A very smooth face with a deep crisp frog means pressed. Irregular shape and a sanded, folded face means handmade. This determines the character far more than the colour does.
5. Judge the colour on a clean, dry face.Break the sample or find a clean sheltered face. A weathered outer face is decades of dirt, algae and pollution, and matching to that gives you a brick that will look wrong when the wall is next cleaned or when the new work weathers.
6. Use a brick matching service.Several UK companies exist purely to match bricks from a sample, and they hold or can source thousands of types including discontinued ones. Post them a brick. It is by a wide margin the most effective route.
7. Try reclamation yards for older bricks.For anything Victorian or earlier, a reclaimed brick of the right period and region is often a much better match than any new brick. Take your sample and expect to hunt across several yards.
8. Buy a sample panel before committing.Get a few of the candidate brick, lay them dry against the existing wall, and look at them in different light and when wet. Bricks change colour dramatically when wet, and a match that works in sun can be obvious in rain.
9. Match the mortar as well.The joint is a substantial proportion of what you see. A perfect brick match with a modern grey mortar in a wall of soft buff lime joints will still read as new work. The mortar is its own matching exercise.
10. Accept an honest near-match and place it well.Exact matches to a hundred-year-old weathered brick do not exist. Put the new work where it is least conspicuous, mix new bricks in across an area rather than concentrating them, and let it weather.

Tips

• If you cannot find a match at all, a deliberately different but sympathetic brick, clearly delineated, often looks better than a bad attempt at a match. Conservation practice frequently prefers honest difference to poor imitation.
• New brickwork always looks newer than it will in two years. Judge a sample panel knowing that the contrast will reduce.
• For a listed building or a conservation area, check whether the brick and the mortar are a consent matter before ordering anything.

Questions people ask