What warm white color to paint built-in bookshelves

March 12, 2025 8:44 AM

PaintFilter: What warm white color should I paint the inside of my new built in bookshelves.

In a fit of hubris, I built a wall's worth of bookshelves, which God willing I'll be installing on the north wall of our living room on Friday. The room itself has windows facing north and west, so doesn't get too bright, and the shelves themselves will be installed to surround the two north-facing windows, so I'm led to believe that I should probably pick a "warm" white color to paint these shelves to compensate for the lack of natural light. But I am completely overwhelmed by my options.

What I'd like:

- A "warm" white color that nevertheless reads WHITE, not "very light yellow" or similar.
- Available from Sherwin Williams.
- Will look good in a satin finish.

Any suggestions hugely appreciated. Thanks!

posted by saladin to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

All of the molding and built ins in the house I grew up in, which was a lot of built ins because my dad was a hobby carpenter, were Sherwin Williams Dover White. It's a perfectly unremarkable white that looks white but is not quite white.
posted by phunniemee at 8:55 AM on March 12 [1 favorite]

We're fans of Swiss Coffee by Benjamin Moore which you can get at Sherwin Williams, last I looked. (On my monitor it looks kinda beigey/yellowy but it isn't in person.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:30 AM on March 12 [4 favorites]

Unhelpfully, a LOT of this depends on the particular light conditions in your particular room. This includes number of windows, directional placement of windows, where in the world you are (quality of light coming in: whites look very different in New Mexico sunshine than that of Minnesota), season, and - especially for white paints - things reflecting either outside or inside, which makes a huge difference. (I painted an attic room Benjamin Moore's White Dove, and it looked much more green than I expected, given reflection from the treetop leaves outside.) All this is to say that if you're picky and you want to get it right, you really need to sample multiple options in the space in question. Also, beware of putting soft/warm white against true white (like trim). I've seen warm whites instantly look yellow if they're next to (or even near) a true white, whereas they looked lovely on their own. Cool colors can also do this. If you're putting this near white trim or something else painted cool, you might want to paint all the trim the same color as this bookcase.

Note that all warm white has the possibility of looking yellow, given the right conditions. The way that a white is warm is that it has yellow in it (sometimes red, but usually at least some yellow). A touch of gray can also be added to counteract this, but sometimes that can make the paint look not warm enough. So I'd strongly recommend getting the smallest size of several contenders, and trying them out in your space. (Also, maybe I'm overly perfectionistic, but the test containers at Sherwin are horrible and watery, and make it hard to get a good sense: I order the smallest size of the regular paint to test, as I think it gives a much clearer sense of reality. Just depends on how picky you are, I guess.)

Also, someone above suggested paint-matching Benjamin Moore at Sherwin Williams. While I love Benjamin Moore's White Dove, I'd strongly recommend against paint matching, especially for white paint. It's always a bit risky to paint match, but white paints are made with so few drops of pigment that it's just way too easy for matching to go south: there's just a lot less wiggle room for error. Most importantly, companies use bases that are different from each other, so the same drops of color in a different base create quite different-looking results, which is especially apparent with light colors like off-white. Even if exactly the same drops of color are added at Sherwin versus Benjamin Moore, it can/will look noticeably different in a different base. See, for instance, this Sherwin paint-matching debacle, which looks yellow.

I'd recommend checking out Sherwin Williams' Alabaster, Greek Villa, Westhighland White, and Pure White. They all have LRVs in the 80s, which most perceive as a soft white/off-white, depending on situational conditions. Pure White is the coolest of the bunch, so if the others show up too yellow, that would be one to try. In my opinion, Alabaster, Greek Villa, and Westhighland White are all fairly similar. Alabaster might be slightly darker and more yellow; Greek Villa is ever so slightly lighter and maybe just a touch more rosy; Westhighland White is a touch lighter still. There's huge overlap between these three, and the appearance will be more down to your specific conditions than major differences between the paints. (There's also Cotton and Cold Foam, in the same genre.). If these don't work, there are some newer Sherwin colors that are lighter that are still warmish (I'm thinking especially of Cheviot, White Snow, etc. - see this).
posted by ClaireBear at 10:03 AM on March 12 [5 favorites]

Just to give you some sense of what these can look like in the flesh (keeping in mind the extremely variability based on situational conditions that I mentioned above):

Alabaster:
Here, here, here (And at that last link you can see that they painted the trim a brighter/cooler white with Alabaster walls, which perhaps undesirably brings out the yellow in Alabaster: if you're doing white walls and white trim, in my opinion it always looks best to do the exact same color in a different sheen, for just this reason.)

Greek Villa:
Here, here, here.

Westhighland White:
Here, here.

Pure White:
Here, here, here. (We actually painted Pure White in our house, and it was much cooler than expected and much cooler than those images.)

As is hopefully apparent, though, they're so similar that most of the difference between them comes on the specific conditions in each house, and it's hard to predict ahead of time. So sampling is your friend, if you're particular! As I mentioned above, I think these are what you're after (soft/warm white), but there are brighter whites (LRVs in upper 80s - low 90s) that you could explore if desired.
posted by ClaireBear at 10:20 AM on March 12

I have used quite a bit of "White Dove" for the interior doors and window and baseboard trim in two recent renovation projects and the results have been quite pleasing for my places and their light.

As ClaireBear states, a lot depends on the incoming and/or provided light in the location where you'll be using the paint but for many rooms this color is a nice choice.

The color name is from Benjamin Moore but any decent paint store will have profiles from most of the major paint manufacturers and can mix it for you from a Sherwin Williams base.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:42 AM on March 12 [1 favorite]

Swiss Coffee - I like Behr's version
posted by XtineHutch at 12:28 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

I made some bookshelves years ago, pine and MDO plywood. I painted them with acrylic paint I had leftover from my kitchen.

They looked great, but books stuck to them for years. The paint guy at the hardware store said I should have used an oil based paint.

I don't know if it was a combination of MDO and acrylic, but the next set of shelves I made I used oil paint without a problem.

I think we'd all like to see pics!
posted by Marky at 3:43 PM on March 12

I highly recommend sampling. When I was in your shoes trying to choose a white paint, I was happy to find Samplize, which sells 9"x14" repositionable samples of the actual paint colors. There's even a "warm white bundle" that contains a number of the suggestions here. But you can buy them as singles and choose whatever colors you want. They have Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams, Farrow and Ball$$, PPG and others. Was others say, they lighting makes a huge difference. Color I thought I'd love landed pukey or fleshy in some lights.

Pro tip - You can snip off just a corner of the backing sheet to expose only a bit of adhesive to hang them for the first round or two of comparisons, leaving the sheet usable again and again. Helpful if you're painting a number of rooms and want to try the samples in each. Once you narrow it down you can commit to sticking the whole sheet to the wall.
posted by cocoagirl at 7:04 AM on March 13 [1 favorite]