2027 Color of the Year: the best rooms and light for each pick

The short answer

Celery suits kitchens, bathrooms, hallways and north-facing rooms that need brightness. Valspar Cottage Door works in bedrooms and bathrooms and on kitchen or vanity cabinets. Glidden Artifact is a home-office and built-in color that likes a sunny room. Behr Grounded belongs in dens, dining rooms and studies painted top to bottom, and on cabinetry. Dutch Boy Deep Rooted is a dining-room, powder-room and accent-wall color. Dulux Soulful Sage has no published code yet, so judge it from a sample in your own light.

Every 2027 pick by room and light

LRV (light reflectance value) runs from 0 for black to 100 for white and is each brand's own figure as listed in our paint catalog; Behr's value for Grounded is a reported one. The light notes assume the northern hemisphere: swap north and south if you live below the equator.

Paint Color Visualizer is not affiliated with any brand named here. Brand and color names belong to their owners and are used only to identify the colors.

How north and south light change a color

A north-facing room gets indirect, bluish light all day, so colors look cooler, greyer and darker than the chip. A south-facing room gets warm, direct sun for most of the day, so colors look lighter and warmer, and pale colors can wash out around noon. East-facing rooms are warm in the morning and cool by afternoon; west-facing rooms are the reverse, with strong golden light in the evening.

Bulbs change the picture after dark. Warm 2700K lamps add yellow, which greys the two blue picks slightly and makes Deep Rooted glow. Neutral 3500K to 4000K bulbs keep Cottage Door and Artifact cleaner and pull Celery toward green. Look at every sample under the lamps you actually use in that room, not only in daylight.

LRV and the size of a room

Colors with an LRV above about 60, like Celery, bounce light around and help a small or dim room feel larger. Mid-tones between about 20 and 60, like Cottage Door and Artifact, show their true color only when the room has reasonable light. Below about 20, Grounded and Deep Rooted absorb more light than they return, which makes a room feel enclosed. That is not a flaw: painting walls, trim and even the ceiling in one deep color blurs the corners of a small room and makes it feel deliberate rather than dark. As a rule, a room with one small north window will make anything under LRV 30 read much deeper than the chip.

Tone on tone: lighter and deeper partners from the same brand

Color drenching, painting walls, trim and ceiling in one family, suits several of this year's muted picks. A lighter step on the ceiling keeps the room from feeling low, and a deeper step on trim or cabinets adds definition. The partners below come from the same brand as each pick: where the brand numbers its colors by card, they are the neighboring steps on the pick's own card; otherwise they are the catalog colors closest to the same hue, one step lighter and one deeper.

Pick by pick: notes for indoor use

Sherwin-Williams Celery

An LRV of 71 puts Celery among the lighter colors you can use without it reading as white. Its yellow undertone is what makes it work in a north-facing kitchen or bathroom: the cool light pulls it toward green and the yellow keeps it from going grey. In a sunny south-facing room it can drift toward butter at midday, so look at the sample at noon before you commit. Queen Anne's Lace (SW 6420, LRV 81) is the next lighter step in Sherwin-Williams' numbering, for a ceiling, and Shagreen (SW 6422, LRV 57) the next deeper one, for cabinets or trim.

Behr Grounded

At a reported LRV of about 11, Grounded absorbs nearly nine-tenths of the light that reaches it. Across all four walls of a den or dining room it reads as a cocooning moss-brown; in a small north room with one window it will look close to charcoal, so plan on warm 2700K lamps. It also works on kitchen cabinets and built-ins against a lighter wall. Behr Manuscript (PPU8-23, LRV 21) and Dried Leaf (S-H-710, LRV 5) are same-brand partners for a softer adjoining wall and a deeper trim, measured against our approximate HEX for Grounded.

Valspar Cottage Door

Cottage Door is a mid-tone at LRV 26, so it needs a room with decent light to stay blue rather than slate. It is a natural fit for bedrooms and bathrooms, and for kitchen or vanity cabinets against white walls. On its own Valspar card, Shale Blue (8004-38D, LRV 37) is one step lighter for an adjoining room, and Flannel Gray (8004-38F, LRV 14) one step deeper for trim or cabinets when you paint the whole room in one family.

Glidden / PPG Artifact

Artifact is darker and smokier than Cottage Door, at LRV 20. In a bright south- or west-facing room the warm sun balances its coolness, which makes it a strong choice for a home office, a library wall or built-in bookcases. In north light, keep it to one wall or the joinery. PPG Symmetry (PPG1037-4, LRV 34) is a lighter companion for adjoining walls, and Silent Night (PPG1153-6, LRV 13) a deeper one for doors and trim.

Dutch Boy Deep Rooted

Deep Rooted is the most saturated pick this year. Afternoon sun in a west- or south-facing room makes it glow orange; north light turns it browner and closer to clay. It suits a dining room, a powder room or a single accent wall behind a sofa or bed, and it pairs naturally with the two 2027 blue-greys, which sit almost opposite it on the color wheel. Deep Rooted is already the deepest step on its Dutch Boy card; the palest step on the same card, Candle Flame (311-1DB, LRV 67), is a warm companion for the ceiling or the next room.

Dulux Soulful Sage

Dulux describes Soulful Sage as a soft, silvery green. It has no published code or LRV yet, so test a Dulux sample on two walls, one beside the window and one facing it, and look at both in the morning and in the evening.

Try the picks on a photo of your own room

Paint Color Visualizer repaints a photo of your room with real colors from 118 paint brands. Upload a photo, choose the walls, ceiling, trim and molding, doors or cabinets, search for a color by name (Celery, Cottage Door, Artifact or Deep Rooted), and compare the result with your original on a before-and-after slider. The render keeps the light and shadows of your photo, so take the picture in the light you live with: a north-facing room on an overcast afternoon, or a south-facing one in full sun. Your first render is free; after that the app uses credits.

Behr's Grounded (T27-01) is newer than the app's Behr library, which also holds an unrelated older color named Grounded (240D-5), so until it arrives try a close match such as Benjamin Moore Mohegan Sage (2138-30) or PPG Moss Rock (PPG1032-7).

Still to come

As of October 6, 2026, Benjamin Moore (expected October 2026) and Pantone (expected early December 2026) have not announced a 2027 color yet; each pick is added to the tables above once it is published.