Bush Buck

It has enough orange undertone to be read as a color, and enough depth to hold a wall. Vista Paint catalogs it as Bush Buck, 0141.

At this LRV (31.0), 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 10.6 is enough to register as a real color choice, without the intensity that would force the rest of a room to match it.

Works as a whole-room color in spaces that are lived in rather than passed through, where its depth has time to register. Afternoon sun will push the orange undertone further warm; if that reads as too much, a cooler bulb in the room can pull it back. PPG Snowbank makes a good second wall color here - different enough to read as a real choice, close enough to still feel related (about 50 points apart in light reflectance).

Rooms already built around blues and cool greys are the hardest fit for this color - the two are opposites, and opposites next to each other rarely feel calm.

Warm metals - brass, aged gold, unlacquered fixtures - gain a contrast against this that they do not have against a lighter wall; it is a common reason people choose a color this deep in the first place. For layering, pair this with a clearly lighter mid-tone on a secondary wall or cabinetry, and keep the ceiling close to white. The gap between each step should be big enough to see without thinking about it (roughly 31.0 / 58 / 85 on the reflectance scale).

If the brand is not fixed, PPG Tanglewood (1073-5) is the same color by measurement - delta-E 0.38. This is a relatively uncrowded spot in the spectrum - just 2 colors from other brands come this close. Matte holds the color truest; a subtle sheen will lift it half a shade under lamps.

It is lighter than 28 percent of the Vista Paint range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 543 colors measure within a point of 31.0 - so most brands will have something close. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.