Fernwood

It has enough yellow undertone to be read as a color, and enough depth to hold a wall. 8402 in the Vista Paint range.

At this LRV (53.0), a room reads as neither bright-white nor dim - a genuinely middle-of-the-road amount of light comes back off the wall. Chroma 10.6 keeps the yellow undertone present without letting it run the room.

It has enough weight for a main wall and enough restraint for a hallway. A warm bulb is the easiest fix if this reads colder than expected once it is on the wall. 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 37.3 points apart on the reflectance scale).

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.

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. 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 53.0 / 69 / 85 on the reflectance scale).

PPG Pale Pine (1030-2) runs close enough - delta-E 1.33 - that swapping brands should not change how the room looks. This is not a rare shade: 3 colors from other brands sit within delta-E 2 of it. Matte holds the color truest; a subtle sheen will lift it half a shade under lamps.

It is lighter than 56 percent of the Vista Paint range. Vista Paint lists it in the K codes, alongside 1,318 other colors.