Behr Says LRV 11. Dutch Boy Says LRV 17. That One Number Decides Whether Your Print Reads

The one number both brands published

Light Reflectance Value is a spec, not an adjective. It sits on a scale where 0 is black and 100 is white, it is measured rather than described, and both of these brands print it on the colour’s own page, where the people who buy paint by the tin will look for it.

Neither press release led with it. None of the coverage checked while researching this piece quoted it either.

2027 pick	Brand	Paint code	Published LRV
Grounded	Behr	T27-01	11
Deep Rooted	Dutch Boy	311-7DB	17.0

Behr’s announcement, dated 26 August 2026, is here, and it describes Grounded as an earthy olive green. The LRV, the RGB values and the hex are not in that release — they sit on Behr’s own colour-detail page for T27-01, which is where we read them.

Dutch Boy’s announcement, dated 25 August 2026, is here, and its own colour-library page for Deep Rooted files the shade under orange, gives the LRV as 17.0, and marks the undertone as Warm.

Two brands, two unrelated corporate parents. Behr’s release describes the company as a subsidiary of Masco Corporation. Forbes, writing up Deep Rooted on 25 August, notes Sherwin-Williams, which owns Dutch Boy. Elle Decor is keeping a live tracker of every 2027 Colour of the Year announced so far, which puts Valspar’s Cottage Door first, then Dutch Boy, then Behr. We covered Cottage Door earlier this month. Sherwin-Williams itself has not named a 2027 Colour of the Year — its Rewild release is a 48-shade forecast, which is a different thing.

That is the news part, and it is the least interesting part.

Six points is not a small difference

Grounded at 11 and Deep Rooted at 17 both sit low on a hundred-point scale, close to the black end and a long way from the white end. That much is obvious from the numbers.

What is less obvious is that they are not interchangeable. Seventeen divided by eleven is about 1.5, so on the published scale Deep Rooted sits roughly half again as far up it as Grounded. That is arithmetic on the two brands’ own figures rather than a measurement of anything, but it is the right way to read the gap: not “both are dark,” but “one is meaningfully darker than the other, and the darker one leaves you less room.”

Room for what, specifically, is the rest of this guide.

On a dark wall, the print stops being the dark thing

This is the part that changes the advice, and it is worth slowing down for.

On a pale wall, a framed print is the darker object in the arrangement. The wall is the bright field, the print is the shape sitting on it, and the edge between them does the work almost automatically. Almost anything reads.

At LRV 11 that relationship flips. The wall is now darker than most of what you would put on it, so the print becomes the bright object. Which sounds like good news, and for a pale print it is. A light botanical, a pale abstract, an off-white paper ground — those gain contrast on a very dark wall rather than losing it.

The ones that lose are the dark ones. A moody landscape, a charcoal drawing on grey stock, a black-and-white photograph with heavy shadows: on a wall at LRV 11 the darkest parts of that print and the wall itself are close enough in tone that the edge between them stops being visible from across the room. The frame is holding the whole boundary on its own. If the frame is also dark, nothing is holding it.

That is the failure mode, and it has nothing to do with whether the art is any good.

The mat is your contrast budget, and your frames already set it

Here is the mechanical part.

On a dark wall, the reliable source of contrast is not the artwork. It is the pale mat around it. The mat is a band of near-white card sitting between the print and the wall, and on a low-LRV wall it is the brightest thing in the arrangement — which is exactly what gives the piece an edge you can see from the sofa.

You do not get to choose how wide that band is. Your frame chose it for you.

We put IKEA’s whole frame ladder into centimetres in what actually fits your IKEA frame: the number on the box is the opening, and the mount that ships inside covers a border all the way round. Subtract the window from the frame, halve the difference, and you have the mat width you already own.

Frame is sold as	Artwork window with the mount	Mat border you get
21 x 30 cm	13 x 18 cm	4.0 cm at the sides, 6.0 cm top and bottom
30 x 40 cm	21 x 30 cm	4.5 cm at the sides, 5.0 cm top and bottom
40 x 50 cm	30 x 40 cm	5.0 cm at the sides, 5.0 cm top and bottom
50 x 70 cm	40 x 50 cm	5.0 cm at the sides, 10.0 cm top and bottom
61 x 91 cm	50 x 70 cm	5.5 cm at the sides, 10.5 cm top and bottom

Read the right-hand column and one conclusion falls straight out. The small frames give you nearly the same side border as the big ones — 4.0 cm against 5.5 cm — but the big frames give you almost twice as much top and bottom. A 50 x 70 cm frame hands you 10 cm of pale card above and below the picture. A 21 x 30 cm frame hands you 6 cm.

So on a wall at LRV 11, the move that works is one larger piece rather than a group of small ones. Not because big art is fashionable, but because the mat is the contrast and the larger frame simply contains more of it. A grid of six small frames on a very dark wall spends its budget on frame edges and gives you six thin borders that read as one texture from two metres away.

At LRV 17 there is a little more slack. A 30 x 40 cm frame with its 4.5 cm border still separates from Deep Rooted in a way it struggles to from Grounded.

Two notes that go with this.

Frame tone matters more than it usually does. A black frame against an LRV 11 wall has almost no tonal step to work with, so the frame effectively disappears and the mat edge becomes the only visible boundary. That can look deliberate and gallery-ish if the mat is generous. It looks like an accident if the mat is thin. Pale oak, natural ash and warm light woods give you a second boundary for free, which is the low-risk choice on both of these colours.

Glass gets louder as the wall gets darker. On a pale wall the reflections in the glass compete with a bright surround and mostly lose. On a wall at LRV 11 the reflected window is often the brightest thing inside the frame. Hang dark-wall pieces where they are not facing a window straight on, and choose matte or textured stock over glossy — a glossy print under glass gives you two reflective layers on the one wall that can least afford them.

The second spec, and why these two walls behave differently

LRV tells you how light or dark a surface is. It says nothing about hue, and that is where these two picks separate again.

Both brands publish RGB values, and the spread between the highest and lowest channel is a rough measure of how much colour is actually in there:

Colour	Published RGB	Published hex	Spread, high channel minus low
Grounded	97, 94, 80	#615E50	17
Deep Rooted	166, 97, 60	#A6613C	106

Grounded’s three channels sit within 17 points of each other. That is a near-neutral: a dark colour with only a slight cast, which is why Behr can call it an olive green and why a photograph of it can look grey, brown or green depending on the light in the room.

Deep Rooted spreads its channels across 106 points. That is a strongly coloured wall.

The practical difference is about arguments, not brightness. A near-neutral has no side to take, so almost any print colour can sit on Grounded without clashing — the only problem it creates is the contrast problem above. A strongly coloured wall does take a side. Prints carrying cool blues and greens will visibly argue with Deep Rooted in a way they will not with Grounded, and no amount of mat width fixes a hue disagreement.

So the two walls fail in different directions. Grounded eats contrast and forgives colour. Deep Rooted eats less contrast and forgives less colour.

What to download for each

Short version, and it follows from the two specs rather than from anybody’s mood board.

For a wall in the Grounded family — dark, near-neutral, LRV 11. Pale grounds. Botanical line work on off-white, light abstract shapes, washed-out landscapes, anything where the paper itself does most of the work. Print it large: 50 x 70 cm as a single piece beats three at 30 x 40 cm. Keep the mat and pick a light frame. Skip dark-ground art unless you want a piece that reads as texture rather than as a picture, which is a legitimate choice but should be a choice.

For a wall in the Deep Rooted family — dark, strongly warm, LRV 17. Warm neutrals, creams, ochres, soft browns, black-and-white with a warm tone. Pale mats again. Cool greys and blue-leaning prints are the ones to avoid, not because they look bad in isolation but because they will look like they were chosen for a different room.

For both. Print at 300 DPI at the final size, on matte or textured stock at 230 to 300 gsm rather than glossy photo paper. If the first print comes out flatter than the file looked, that is usually a colour-handling problem and not a paper problem — we covered the fix. And if you already have a dark room and want the whole look rather than the single piece, the dark cottagecore kitchen guide is the closest thing on this site to a worked example.

Four things this guide is not going to tell you

What the seven companion colours do. Behr’s release names seven reintroduced legacy colours alongside Grounded — Coastal Beige, Wheat Grass, Environmental, Denim Light, Smokey Claret, Sarsaparilla and Mozart. It publishes no LRV, RGB or hex for any of them. This guide runs on published specs, so where there is no spec, there is no advice.

Whether people actually want a dark wall. Behr’s release carries survey figures — 84% of Americans agreeing the right paint colour is critical to making a space feel like home, 86% saying home projects help them feel grounded, 77% saying they turn to nature when life feels chaotic. That is a survey Behr commissioned itself, n=1,000 general-population Americans, fielded 23 June to 2 July 2026, with a stated margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points at 95% confidence. Brand-commissioned research is not independent evidence of a trend, and this guide does not use it as any.

What either colour looks like. The hex values above are exact and the renders on this page are not. A hex on a backlit screen is a different physical object from a matte plaster wall under an afternoon sun, and the interior images in this guide are AI-generated visualizations, so treat every colour on this page as an approximation. If you need a match, take the code to a paint counter.

Whether 2027 is really dark. Three brands have declared so far and two of them went dark. That is a pattern of three, announced on a marketing calendar, by companies whose business is selling you the next tin. It is a bet on next year’s mood board, not a finding.

Test it before you commit to anything

The cheapest version of this whole guide costs one sheet of paper.

Behr’s release says a peel-and-stick sample of Grounded is available through Samplize, and that from 26 August through 27 September an order of two or more samples takes the 2027 Colour of the Year sample free with the code GROUNDED at checkout. That is Behr’s own US-facing promotion, and this site has no relationship with either company.

The useful part is the size. Converted at 1 inch = 2.54 cm, that sample sheet is 22.86 x 38.1 cm — bigger than a 21 x 30 cm frame and smaller than a 30 x 40 cm one. Which means you can stick it on the wall, hold the frame and mat you already own directly against it, and see the actual contrast step with your own eyes before you buy a litre of paint or a single file.

If you cannot get that sample where you live, a hardware shop will mix to a description, or you can paint an A4 sheet at 21 x 29.7 cm and tape it up. The method matters more than the brand.

The five-minute version

1. Both 2027 picks publish an LRV: Behr’s Grounded is 11, Dutch Boy’s Deep Rooted is 17.0. Low numbers, close to the black end of a 0 to 100 scale.
2. On a wall that dark the print becomes the bright object, so pale-ground art gains and dark-ground art disappears.
3. The pale mat is the contrast, and the frame you own has already set its width. Check it against the ladder above before you blame the artwork.
4. One 50 x 70 cm piece gives you 10 cm of mat top and bottom. Six small frames give you six thin borders and one texture. On a very dark wall, go bigger rather than wider.
5. Light frames give you a second edge for free. Black frames on an LRV 11 wall only work with a generous mat.
6. Grounded is near-neutral, so it forgives colour and eats contrast. Deep Rooted is strongly warm, so it eats less contrast and argues with cool prints.
7. Tape a 22.86 x 38.1 cm sample to the wall and hold your own frame against it. Five minutes, and it settles the question the specs only narrow down.

A colour of the year is a paint brand’s bet on next year’s mood board. The LRV underneath it is the only part of the announcement you can measure a wall against.

Pin this guide

The colour name changes every year. The number underneath it is the one that tells you how wide your mat has to be. Save the ladder.

• 

•