Codman Claret

The kind of dark where most people would just call it black without looking twice, though the red is there for anyone who does. 1328, from Vista Paint.

At LRV 9.0 the walls stop contributing light altogether and the lamps have to do the work. In dim, ambient light this reads as a flat, undifferentiated dark; it takes a direct light source for the red to surface at all.

If the room already has blues and cool greys in the floor, a rug, or the furniture, this color will fight it rather than sit well beside it - the two sit at opposite ends of the color spectrum, which is exactly why they clash instead of blend.

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. A natural scheme here moves in three clear steps: this color on the main wall, a noticeably lighter mid-tone for a second wall or built-in, and a near-white on the ceiling. Each jump should be obvious at a glance, not something you have to squint to tell apart (roughly 9.0, 47 and 85 on the light-reflectance scale, for reference).

On the wall opposite the room's main window, this catches the most daylight available and is the one wall where the color reads true rather than flat. Behr Rocky Mountain Sky makes a good second wall color here - different enough to read as a real choice, close enough to still feel related (about 42 points apart in light reflectance).

If the wall has any texture or repair work, matte is worth the trade-off even though it holds up to less scrubbing than a satin or eggshell.

For anyone tied to a different brand, Behr Country Lane Red (QE-07) is the nearest stand-in, at a delta-E of 1.5. This is a relatively uncrowded spot in the spectrum - just 1 color from other brands come this close.

It is lighter than 4 percent of the Vista Paint range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 442 colors measure within a point of 9.0 - so most brands will have something close. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.