Favorite Things

Neither bold nor shy - a blue undertone with enough weight to matter and enough restraint to live with. Vista Paint's designation for it is 7233.

LRV 48.0 - comfortably in the range that suits a whole room rather than one wall. Chroma 8.7 keeps the blue undertone present without letting it run the room.

It has enough weight for a main wall and enough restraint for a hallway. The blue undertone is more noticeable under cool, daylight-balanced bulbs than under standard warm ones, which tend to mute it. Dunn-Edwards Lighthouse pairs well as a second surface - close enough in feel to belong in the same room, far enough in lightness to read as two distinct walls (about 42.3 points apart on the reflectance scale).

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

Next to it, white trim reads brighter and cooler than it does anywhere else in the house - the gap in light reflectance is what does that, not the trim paint itself. 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 48.0 / 67 / 85 on the reflectance scale).

Behr Simply Blue (PPU15-16) runs close enough - delta-E 1.66 - that swapping brands should not change how the room looks. This is a relatively uncrowded spot in the spectrum - just 2 colors from other brands come this close. Eggshell is a common middle ground here - enough durability for a lived-in room without the sheen that would draw attention to wall imperfections.

It is lighter than 51 percent of the Vista Paint range. Vista Paint lists it in the K codes, alongside 1,318 other colors.