Nightfall

Little light comes back off a wall this dark, so the yellow undertone mostly lives in memory and in direct light rather than in a glance across the room. 0340 in the Vista Paint range.

At 11.0, light hits this wall and mostly stops there - plan the room's lighting as if the walls were not helping at all. This is a color that changes more with the time of day than with the season - the yellow undertone is more visible in long, low evening light than at noon.

Worth checking before committing to a full wall: blues and cool greys 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.

Wood tones next to this read darker and richer than they do against a paler wall; it is one of the more dependable effects of putting a light-absorbing color next to anything reflective. 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 11.0, 48 and 85, if you're matching by the numbers).

Behind open shelving or artwork, a wall this dark acts as a backdrop that makes whatever is in front of it stand out rather than compete. Dunn-Edwards Baby Seal 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 26.3 points apart on the reflectance scale).

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

For anyone tied to a different brand, Behr Frontier Shadow (740D-7) is the nearest stand-in, at a delta-E of 1.2. 3 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 8 percent of the Vista Paint range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 546 colors measure within a point of 11.0 - so most brands will have something close. The name is not unique: Benjamin Moore 1596 and Dunn-Edwards DE5804 also sell a color called Nightfall, and it is not the same shade. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.