HOW TO: Choose the right paint colour

HOW TO: Choose the right paint colour

This comes up at every one of my Drop-in Design Clinics, so I’ve enlisted the help of an expert for an indispensable guide - including what to use in rooms that are small, dark, or north-facing

Kate Watson-Smyth

Oct 26, 2026

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I first met Rob Abrahams, the co-founder of COAT paints, in a café in Covent Garden, where we spent an unhealthy amount of time geeking out over the wall colour and wondering how to re-create it. For the record, it was a sort of dirty yellow that looked like it had had years of intellectual smoke blown over it and had absorbed the highs and lows of those conversations into its very essence. I mean, yes, grubby yellow was the general vibe, but even with the madness of today’s paint names, that one probably isn’t going to sell.

“Will that be Fifty Years of Tobacco Smoke in matt or emulsion, Madam? And would you like five litres or 2.5?”

In fact COAT does have several evocative paint names in its ever-expanding collection - The Tobacconist being one (but that’s olive green), Cafe Flore is basically beige, Brasserie Brown is, well, brown, and Factor Fifty (its most popular plaster pink) definitely deserves an honourable mention.

What it doesn’t have is anything resembling the colour of an

actual

Parisian café, a colour my husband now likes to call Old Beige, but which originated in our text messages as Comatose Hamster.

Anyway, the point being that Rob can get lost in paint colours and loves digging into the data, so I thought he would be perfect as a sounding board for the most commonly asked paint questions, including:

How to choose the right neutral?

What colour works in a north-facing room?

How can I make a small room look larger?

Every time I host my monthly

Drop-in Design Clinic

there are questions about colour and light, so I asked Rob - who says COAT’s (very sophisticated) chatbot fields hundreds of questions every day - to help answer some of them for you.

Join us for interior design chat

His first point is that we are often asking the wrong question. I’ll let him explain:

Rob Abrahams, co-founder with Rob Green, of COAT paints

COAT was founded in 2020 and is the UK’s first B Corp Certified, and (the world’s) only Climate Positive paint company. All its paint is sold direct, made to order and delivered the next day. If you are in London you can order it for delivery in under two hours.

SHOULD I USE A GLOSS TO BOUNCE LIGHT AROUND A DARK ROOM?

People often ask about this but it’s less about the sheen and more about the

Light Reflectance Value (LRV)

because that has more of an impact on how bright the room feels. People tend to mix the two things up: sheen is just the behaviour of the existing light, while LRV is how much of that light you want to show.

LRV is essentially how much light the colour bounces around the room on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is black and100 is pure white. Sometimes colours can look quite optically close, but have very, very different LRVs depending on the pigments and the undertones that are used in them.

A colour will either absorb the light (so take it away) or reflect it. So that has an active visual impact on the lightness of the room. The sheen will just bounce around whatever light is already in there. So a glossy ceiling will reflect the light, but it’s not going to change how light the room is. If you’re looking to make a space feel lighter you need to look at the LRV of a colour.

A mid blue might have a different LRV from a mid-green, even if they both seem to have the same depth of colour when you first look at them - and that’s why you might find that one pale blue makes your room feel bigger and lighter, but a similarly toned pale green doesn’t have the same effect. It’s because the LRV reacts to the existing light, whereas the sheen is not going to change how much light is in there in the first place.

Following our conversation COAT has now added the LRV to its website, so you can see for yourself. The Good China is a gentle pale blue with an LRV of 69, while Yard Party is a green, rated 53. Both are similarly toned but the blue will reflect more light than the green.

The Good China (LRV 69) and Yard Party (LRV 53)

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. This is where you really learn how to make the most of your own space so that it inspires, supports and nourishes your soul. And all homes should do that. Come and join us - and in addition to an extra weekly post you also gain access to my monthly Drop-in Design Clinic on Zoom, where you can bring me your decorating dilemmas and we will chat them through.

Join us for interior design chat

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