A coastal colour palette is not hard to describe. A warm white, a sand, a soft blue or green with grey in it, maybe a driftwood taupe, and — if you want one — a single dark for contrast. That description has been on the front of every paint-store brochure since about 2005, and if it were enough, nobody would ever get it wrong.
People get it wrong constantly, and the failures are consistent: the white goes cold, the blue goes minty, the sand goes pink, and the room that was going to feel like a beach house feels like a dentist. None of those is a bad swatch. Every one of them is a swatch that was correct on the card and behaved differently on a wall — because of how much of it there was, how much light it reflected, and what the light in that particular room was doing to it.
So this guide is a palette with the numbers attached. Proportion first (how much of each colour), then reflectance (the LRV of every colour, from the makers), then light (what windows and bulbs do), then the sampling method that catches the problem before the second coat.
The Proportion: 60, 30, 10
The rule designers actually use for distributing colour in a room is 60-30-10: 60% of the visible surface in a dominant colour, 30% in a secondary, 10% in an accent. It's an old proportional idea — it maps onto the same ratios that make a well-cut suit or a classical façade look right — and it's the difference between a coastal room and a room with some coastal colours in it.
In a coastal room, the assignment is almost fixed:
- 60% — the white. Walls, ceiling, trim, usually the largest upholstered piece. This is why the white is the most important decision in the palette and the one people spend the least time on. Not "white" — a white, with a known warmth and a known LRV.
- 30% — the sand or driftwood. Floors, the rug, the wood furniture, the linen that isn't white. Warm, low-saturation neutrals in the beige-to-taupe range. This is the layer that stops the room from being a white box, and it's mostly not paint.
- 10% — the blue or green. Cushions, a throw, one piece of art, a single painted piece of furniture, or — in a bedroom or bathroom — one wall. Ten percent is much less than most people use. If the blue is on the walls of the living room and the sofa and the rug, the room has become nautical or Hamptons, which are different styles with different arithmetic.
There's an optional fourth layer at 1–3%: a dark, for a picture frame, a lamp base, a door. The darks are at the end of this guide, with their numbers, and the number is the whole point — they're chosen for how dark, not which colour.
The Reflectance: What LRV Is and Why It Decides Everything
Every paint colour carries a Light Reflectance Value — a figure from 0 to 100 for the percentage of light it bounces back. It's printed on the back of most chips and listed on every manufacturer's colour page. A coastal room is, above all else, a high-LRV room: its walls are in the 80s and 90s, its floors and fabrics in the 60s, and the whole reason the style feels like light and air is that the surfaces are throwing three-quarters of the daylight back into the room instead of absorbing it.
Two things about LRV that the paint store won't tell you:
- Colours read stronger on a wall than on a chip. A 2-inch swatch under fluorescent tubes shows you the hue. A 12-foot wall of it in daylight shows you the quantity — the colour reflects onto itself from every adjacent surface and reads noticeably more saturated and, for pale colours, brighter. Paint contractors put the effect at roughly two to three times the intensity of the chip. This is why the "barely there" blue on the card is a swimming pool by the second coat.
- The gap between colours matters more than the colours. The coastal look depends on the white and the accent being far apart on the LRV scale — thirty points or more — so the accent reads as a deliberate colour against a bright field rather than as a slightly different pale. Two colours in the 70s next to each other look like a mistake. A 92 next to a 60 looks like a decision.
With that, here are the colours. Sherwin-Williams publishes LRV on its own product pages, and those figures are exact. Benjamin Moore's consumer pages don't always show a number, so the Benjamin Moore figures below are the consensus from the colour databases that track them, given as a range where they disagree. Farrow & Ball does not publish LRV at all, and its colours are listed without one.
The whites (the 60%)
| Colour | Maker | LRV | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pure White (SW 7005) | Sherwin-Williams | 84.0 | The cleanest of the warm whites — soft, not stark. The safest coastal wall white. |
| Snowbound (SW 7004) | Sherwin-Williams | 82.8 | Creamy, with a faint grey-violet undertone that keeps it from going yellow. |
| Alabaster (SW 7008) | Sherwin-Williams | 82.2 | The warmest of the three — the one for a north room or a house without much sun. |
| Cloud White (OC-130) | Benjamin Moore | ~85 | Soft, warm, a little beige. Reads as an old-house white. |
| Simply White (OC-117) | Benjamin Moore | ~90–92 | Bright with a whisper of yellow; the brightest white here that still feels warm. |
| Paper White (OC-55) | Benjamin Moore | ~75 | A white with grey and a touch of blue in it — cooler, quieter, and only for rooms with a lot of warm light. |
The rule inside the rule: pick the white by the light in the room (below), not by the chip. All six of these are "coastal whites." Only one or two of them will be right in your house.
The sands and driftwoods (the 30%)
Most of this layer is wood and fibre, not paint. Where it is paint — a hallway, a room that shouldn't be white, the underside of a porch ceiling — these are the ones with the right warmth and enough reflectance to stay coastal:
| Colour | Maker | LRV | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shoji White (SW 7042) | Sherwin-Williams | 74.3 | Barely a colour — a white that's given up and become sand. The bridge between the 60 and the 30. |
| Pale Oak (OC-20) | Benjamin Moore | ~68–69 | Warm white in sun, greige in shade. The classic driftwood wall. |
| Manchester Tan (HC-81) | Benjamin Moore | ~64 | Soft tan with a green undertone that sits well next to sea-glass blues. |
| Edgecomb Gray (HC-173) | Benjamin Moore | ~63 | Beige balanced by grey — the one for a house that already has a lot of warm wood. |
| Agreeable Gray (SW 7029) | Sherwin-Williams | 60.4 | The most-sold greige in America. Fine, but on the cool side for this style; better in the Hamptons version. |
| Accessible Beige (SW 7036) | Sherwin-Williams | 57.7 | The darkest here — a true sand. Good on an exterior or a mudroom, heavy on a living-room wall. |
The blues and greens (the 10%)
This is the layer people obsess over and the one that matters least, provided the white is right. Every colour below works. The choice is about temperature — how much green versus grey versus blue — and about how far below the white it sits.
| Colour | Maker | LRV | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sea Salt (SW 6204) | Sherwin-Williams | 63.2 | The most-used coastal colour in the country. Grey-green; leans blue in cool light and green in warm. |
| Tradewind (SW 6218) | Sherwin-Williams | 60.7 | Clear, soft blue with a little grey. The most literally "sea" of the group. |
| Rainwashed (SW 6211) | Sherwin-Williams | ~59 | Sea Salt with more blue and a shade deeper. |
| Comfort Gray (SW 6205) | Sherwin-Williams | 53.8 | Grey-green, deeper than Sea Salt — for a room with enough white to carry it. |
| Krypton (SW 6247) | Sherwin-Williams | 51.9 | Grey-blue, cooler than the rest. The one for a Hamptons lean. |
| Silvermist (SW 7621) | Sherwin-Williams | 46.9 | Blue-green-grey, the darkest of the Sherwin-Williams set — an accent-wall colour, not a room colour. |
| Breath of Fresh Air (806) | Benjamin Moore | ~69 | The palest blue here. For a small room or a ceiling. |
| Quiet Moments (1563) | Benjamin Moore | ~60–62 | Grey-blue-green with a warm undertone; the most sophisticated of the group. |
| Woodlawn Blue (HC-147) | Benjamin Moore | ~60–62 | Blue-green with a grey cast, historically toned. |
| Gray Wisp (1570) | Benjamin Moore | ~54 | Light grey with green in it — "aloe" is the maker's own word. |
| Beach Glass (1564) | Benjamin Moore | ~50–52 | Blue-green with grey; deeper and more saturated than the name suggests. |
| Wythe Blue (HC-143) | Benjamin Moore | ~48 | Blue-green with grey — the front-door colour of the style, and a strong accent wall. |
| Light Blue (No. 22) | Farrow & Ball | not published | Silvery blue-grey that swings green in warm light. |
| Pale Powder (No. 204) | Farrow & Ball | not published | Muted blue-green with a soft yellow cast; the palest F&B option. |
| Cromarty (No. 285) | Farrow & Ball | not published | Blue-green on a cool grey base. |
Notice where the numbers sit: the accents you can put on a whole wall are in the 60s (Sea Salt, Tradewind, Quiet Moments, Woodlawn), a comfortable twenty to thirty points below the whites. The ones in the 40s and 50s — Silvermist, Wythe Blue, Beach Glass — are for a single wall, a vanity, a door. Used on four walls they take the room somewhere else.
The darks (the 1–3%)
A coastal room can carry one dark. Its job is contrast, and its LRV tells you how much:
| Colour | Maker | LRV | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kendall Charcoal (HC-166) | Benjamin Moore | ~15 | Warm charcoal — the coastal dark that isn't navy. Frames, a lamp, a console. |
| Slate Tile (SW 7624) | Sherwin-Williams | 14.8 | Blue-grey charcoal. Softer than a true black. |
| Van Deusen Blue (HC-156) | Benjamin Moore | ~10–12 | A grey-based navy; the door colour. |
| Hale Navy (HC-154) | Benjamin Moore | ~6–8 | The navy. Note the number — it's nearly black. A little goes the whole way. |
| Naval (SW 6244) | Sherwin-Williams | 4.5 | Darker still. This is a nautical colour; in a coastal room it's a picture frame at most. |
The style anchor warns against navy for a reason, and the numbers show it: at LRV 4 to 8, these colours absorb over ninety percent of the light that hits them. One of them on a dining chair is a beautiful contrast. One of them on a wall is a different style.
The Light: North, South and 2700K
The same palette in two houses on the same street comes out differently, and the reason is the direction the windows face and the bulbs in the ceiling.
South- and west-facing rooms get direct, warm light for much of the day. Pale colours read brighter and warmer in them; a warm white can drift toward cream, and a grey-green like Sea Salt shows its green. These rooms take the cooler whites (Pure White, Simply White) and the bluer accents (Tradewind, Rainwashed).
North-facing rooms get indirect, cool, blue-tinged light all day. Colours read flatter and cooler, and a white with any grey in it can go dead. These rooms take the warmest whites (Alabaster, Cloud White), and the accents with green or warmth in them (Sea Salt, Quiet Moments, Pale Powder). Pale blue in a north room is the classic coastal mistake: the room becomes a walk-in refrigerator.
Then there's the light you switch on. The colour temperature of a bulb is stamped on the box in Kelvin, and it changes whites and pale blues more than most people expect — the technical name for a colour that matches under one light and not another is metamerism, and pale neutrals are the most prone to it. Paint makers' own guidance is direct about the effect: under warm bulbs around 2700K, whites and greys pick up an orange or yellow cast and greens go muddy; under cooler bulbs (3500–4000K and up) the same colours pull blue or green and whites go clinical. For a coastal palette, 2700–3000K is the safe band — it keeps the whites warm without turning the blues to sludge — and the important thing is to decide the bulbs before you sample the paint, and sample under them.
The Sampling Method
The reason coastal palettes get repainted is that the sample was small, in the wrong place, and looked at once. Benjamin Moore's own how-to guidance for samples is the one to follow, and it's four steps:
- Paint a swatch at least 2×2 feet — the sample pots are sized for it — on the actual wall, or on a large board you can move. Two coats. A chip taped to the wall tells you almost nothing.
- Put it on the wall you look at most — the one the sofa faces, the one the bed faces, the one the mirror reflects — and a second swatch on the wall next to the window, where the light rakes across it.
- Look at it three times in a day: morning, mid-afternoon, and after dark under the bulbs you've chosen. A coastal blue that's right at noon and wrong at 8 p.m. is wrong.
- Sample the white and the accent together, side by side. The white on its own tells you it's a white. The white next to the blue tells you whether the thirty-point gap is really there.
If the swatch reads two or three shades stronger than the chip did, that's normal — that's the wall effect from the second section. If it reads colder than the chip, the room's light is cool and you need a warmer white; if it reads yellow, the reverse. Move one step along the tables above and sample again. It's a Saturday; a repaint is a week.
Three Palettes That Hold
To make it concrete, three complete palettes from the tables, each with the 60-30-10 assignment and the gap:
Pale and classic. Pure White (84) on walls and trim; Pale Oak (~68) on the hallway and the wood tones it matches; Sea Salt (63) in textiles and on one bedroom wall; Kendall Charcoal (~15) on frames. Gap between white and accent: 21 points — the minimum that still reads as a decision.
Warm, north-facing house. Alabaster (82) throughout; Manchester Tan (~64) on a mudroom and in the sisal and oak; Quiet Moments (~61) as the accent; Van Deusen Blue (~11) on the front door only. Gap: 21 points, with warmth in every layer to counter the light.
Bright, south-facing, a little Hamptons. Simply White (~91) walls; Shoji White (74) on a ceiling or a porch; Tradewind (61) as the accent; Slate Tile (15) on the dining chairs. Gap: 30 points — the most contrast the coastal style comfortably holds before it becomes something else.
Every room in this style world uses one of those structures: the bedroom puts the accent on the wall, the bathroom changes the sheen and the bulb, the living room keeps the accent to the ten percent, and the dining room is where the dark gets its one chair. The style anchor has the light rule that all of it comes from.
