Colour insights
What a colour does to a room and to the people in it, and which shades on our card to reach for.
The same tin reads differently at breakfast, at noon, in a north-facing room and under a bulb. Every shade on this site has a lighting preview for exactly this reason.
That figure is the LRV, printed on every shade page. Below about 20 a room needs the light on in daytime; above about 70 the colour bounces onto everything near it. It tells you more about how a room will feel than the name of the shade does.
Warm colours make a space feel more contained, cool ones make it feel larger. It is the cheapest way to change the apparent size of a room.
Not darkness: visible boundaries. Carrying a colour over the ceiling and the trim removes the lines the eye reads as the edge of the space.
White is not one colour but a family of very slightly tinted ones, and the tint decides everything. A warm off-white keeps a north-facing room from reading cold; a cool one stops a sunlit wall going creamy in the afternoon. The mistake is choosing brilliant white by default: it is the least forgiving shade there is, and it makes every other white in the room look dirty by comparison.
Works well in: Ceilings, trim, and any room where the daylight is the feature.
LRV 100
LRV 91.3
LRV 85.7
LRV 81.8
LRV 89.2
LRV 93.3
A neutral is doing a job by not doing much. It lets furniture, art and people be the thing you notice. The trap is that greys are rarely neutral: almost all of them lean warm or cool, and a cool grey in a room with warm light turns faintly purple in the evening. Look at the shade at the time of day the room is actually used.
Works well in: Living rooms, hallways, offices, anywhere the contents matter more than the walls.
LRV 56.5
LRV 38.1
LRV 16.7
LRV 25.6
LRV 10.4
LRV 4.5
Yellow returns a great deal of the light that falls on it, which is why a pale ochre can make a room with one small window feel as though it has two. It is also the family that changes most between daylight and a bulb: a yellow chosen at noon will be noticeably deeper at eight in the evening. Strong yellows work better on one wall, in a hallway, or outside, than across a whole small room.
Works well in: Kitchens, hallways, stairwells, and exteriors that take the sun.
LRV 57.6
LRV 44.4
LRV 30.6
LRV 77.3
LRV 71.1
LRV 45.6
Warm colours advance: a red wall reads as closer than it is, which makes a large room feel more contained and a small one feel smaller. Terracottas and clay reds do this gently and are far easier to live with than a saturated red, which is why they turn up in dining rooms and restaurants; the association with food and warmth is old and reliable.
Works well in: Dining rooms, feature walls, front doors, and rooms used mostly after dark.
LRV 10.5
LRV 21.2
LRV 11.9
LRV 10.3
LRV 43.2
LRV 6.7
Green sits in the middle of what the eye is built to see, which is the least contentious reason it reads as restful: less adjustment is needed to look at it. Soft sage and olive shades carry that without going institutional, and deep greens make a small room feel deliberate rather than cramped.
Works well in: Bedrooms, studies, bathrooms, and anywhere meant to slow down.
LRV 12
LRV 6.5
LRV 44.6
LRV 29.2
LRV 18.5
LRV 68.7
Cool colours recede, so a blue wall reads as further off and a room feels larger. That works for you and against you: the same property makes a north-facing room that is already cool feel colder still. In strong Ghanaian light a mid-blue holds its character well; in a shaded room it wants a warm floor or warm trim to balance it.
Works well in: Bedrooms, bathrooms, and rooms with plenty of direct light.
LRV 7.7
LRV 3.9
LRV 64.2
LRV 14.3
LRV 13
LRV 75.8
Earth tones are the most forgiving family outdoors: their pigments are iron oxides, which are extremely stable in sunlight, so they fade slowly and gracefully. Indoors they do what wood does: they make a room feel settled. They also hide a great deal, which matters on a wall that gets touched.
Works well in: Exteriors, hallways, and any wall that takes a knock.
LRV 6.1
LRV 13.5
LRV 4.1
LRV 46.4
LRV 34.8
LRV 57.2
Everything above is a starting point. A colour chosen from a screen is chosen under a light it will never live in; paint a patch on the actual wall and look at it at more than one time of day before you commit.
