Cranberry Craze

It is dark enough that the room, not the paint, becomes the thing you notice - though the orange undertone keeps it from reading as flat black. 8773, from Vista Paint.

At 10.0, light hits this wall and mostly stops there - plan the room's lighting as if the walls were not helping at all. In dim, ambient light this reads as a flat, undifferentiated dark; it takes a direct light source for the orange undertone to surface at all.

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.

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. 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 10.0 to 48 to 85 in LRV terms).

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 Gray Timber Wolf makes a good second wall color here - different enough to read as a real choice, close enough to still feel related (about 32 points apart in light reflectance).

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

If the brand is not fixed, Dunn-Edwards Chocolate Chunk (DE6070) is the same color by measurement - delta-E 0.89. 4 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.

It is lighter than 5 percent of the Vista Paint range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 533 colors measure within a point of 10.0 - so most brands will have something close. Vista Paint lists it in the K codes, alongside 1,318 other colors.