In the Blue

Mid-range in both light and color, which is the most forgiving place to be. 0504 in the Vista Paint range.

At LRV 43.0 it sits where most rooms want a wall: light enough to feel open, dark enough to have a surface. Chroma 8.3 keeps the blue undertone present without letting it run the room.

Works as a whole-room color in spaces that are lived in rather than passed through, where its depth has time to register. 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 47.3 points apart on the reflectance scale).

Worth checking before committing to a full wall: oranges and warm terracotta nearby - in a floor, a rug, a piece of furniture - will read as a clash here, not a complement, since the two colors sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.

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. The safest multi-color scheme moves from this dark wall to a noticeably lighter secondary tone, then to a near-white ceiling - three genuinely different depths rather than three shades of the same idea (LRV 43.0, 64 and 85, if you're matching by the numbers).

By the numbers, Sherwin-Williams Dockside Blue (SW 7601) and this color are indistinguishable - delta-E 0.72, well under what the eye can separate. 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. 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 44 percent of the Vista Paint range. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.