Farmer'S Tan

It has enough orange to be read as a color, and enough depth to hold a wall. LC220-02, from Kilz.

At this LRV (44.8), a room reads as neither bright-white nor dim - a genuinely middle-of-the-road amount of light comes back off the wall. A chroma of 15.9 is enough to register as a real color choice, without the intensity that would force the rest of a room to match it.

Bedrooms and living rooms, where it is seen in lamplight as much as daylight. In a room that gets little direct sun, this color's warmth does some of the work daylight would otherwise be doing. Dunn-Edwards Lighthouse makes a good second wall color here - different enough to read as a real choice, close enough to still feel related (about 45.5 points apart in light reflectance).

This color and blues and cool greys don't get along in the same room - they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, so pairing them tends to feel like tension rather than contrast.

The lighter the trim beside this, the more it will seem to glow - a side effect of the light-reflectance gap rather than anything special about the trim color. If the room needs more than one wall color, keep the steps far apart: this color, then something clearly lighter for a second surface, then a bright white above. Two similar tones just look like a mismatch; three distinct ones read as a plan (about 44.8 to 65 to 85 in LRV terms).

If the brand is not fixed, Benjamin Moore Cream Soda (1082) is the same color by measurement - delta-E 0.63. 7 other-brand colors land within delta-E 2 of this one - a well-populated part of the spectrum with several near-equivalents to choose from. 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 56 percent of the Kilz range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 641 colors measure within a point of 44.8 - so most brands will have something close. Kilz lists it in the LC codes, alongside 39 other colors.