Smoky Mountain

Neutral enough to sit under other colors, with a true neutral underneath. Dunn-Edwards files it as DE6388.

Chroma 2.7 means the color content is small, which is exactly why the true neutral matters so much - there is nothing else here to distract from it. South light flatters it. In a north-facing room it can turn cold, so sample that wall first.

At this LRV (40.0), a room reads as neither bright-white nor dim - a genuinely middle-of-the-road amount of light comes back off the wall. Open-plan walls, hallways, anywhere the color has to work in several exposures at once.

For a secondary wall, Dunn-Edwards Lighthouse gives a natural step up in brightness without feeling like a mismatch (roughly 50.3 LRV points apart).

Sherwin-Williams Mystical Shade (SW 6276) matches it closely enough that no one will tell them apart on a wall. This is not a rare shade: 3 colors from other brands sit within delta-E 2 of it. A satin finish is worth it in a room that needs to be wiped down often, at the cost of showing a bit more of the wall's surface than a flat finish would.

It is lighter than 40 percent of the Dunn-Edwards range. The name is not unique: Benjamin Moore AC-18 also sells a color called Smoky Mountain, and it is not the same shade. Dunn-Edwards lists it in the DE codes, alongside 1,399 other colors.