Raisin

Near the bottom of the LRV scale, where the orange stops being read as hue and starts being read as shadow. Benjamin Moore's designation for it is 1237.

At 11.8, light hits this wall and mostly stops there - plan the room's lighting as if the walls were not helping at all. Warm bulbs pull the orange forward, close to the surface; daylight bulbs flatten it back into something closer to plain black.

Worth checking before committing to a full wall: blues and cool greys nearby - in a floor, a rug, a piece of furniture - will read as a clash here, not a complement, since the two colors sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Anything pale placed against this wall will look paler than it is; anything warm-metal will look warmer. Neither is an illusion the color plays deliberately - it is simple contrast, but worth planning rather than discovering. The safest multi-color scheme moves from this dark wall to a noticeably lighter secondary tone, then to a near-white ceiling - three genuinely different depths rather than three shades of the same idea (LRV 11.8, 48 and 85, if you're matching by the numbers).

It belongs on a feature wall in a room that already has light to spare, rather than on every wall of a room that needs brightening. Behr Gray Timber Wolf pairs well as a second surface - close enough in feel to belong in the same room, far enough in lightness to read as two distinct walls (about 30.2 points apart on the reflectance scale).

A flat or matte finish hides surface imperfections that a color this dark would otherwise flag under any raking light.

For anyone tied to a different brand, Dunn-Edwards Deep Brown (DE6077) is the nearest stand-in, at a delta-E of 1.64. Only 1 other-brand color land within delta-E 2 of this one, which makes it comparatively unusual.

It is lighter than 12 percent of the Benjamin Moore range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 914 colors measure within a point of 11.8 - so most brands will have something close. The name is not unique: Sherwin-Williams SW 7630 also sells a color called Raisin, and it is not the same shade. Benjamin Moore lists it in the 1000 series, alongside 621 other colors.