What Makes a Great Paint Chip: Martha Stewart Living and Other Brands

On a recent trip to Home Depot we checked out the new Martha Stewart Living Paint collection and were immediately impressed by Martha Stewart’s signature eye for color. The chips themselves are beautiful, but what really stood out were the helpful extras printed on the reverse side—small design-forward details that make choosing and coordinating paint much simpler.

Thoughtful coordination built into the chips

One standout feature of the Martha chips is the way they suggest coordinating colors directly on the sample. Each swatch includes a recommended ceiling color at the top and a trim or woodwork color at the bottom. The card is designed so you can fold the suggested colors over the front, helping you visualize how the main color pairs with ceiling and trim choices. That simple folding idea encourages fresh combinations you might not consider otherwise—for example, pairing a slate-blue trim with a milky white wall for an unexpected but cohesive result.

Room-to-room harmony and organization

Martha’s chips also include small icons in the corners that can be matched to create a cohesive scheme for an entire house. This makes it easier to plan color flow from room to room without relying on guesswork. Additionally, the chips provide space for notes so you can record where each color is used. For anyone who prefers a highly organized approach to home color schemes, these little touches are genuinely helpful.

Other brands that add useful features

We also looked at other popular brands while shopping. Glidden, another Home Depot brand, now includes coordinating color suggestions on the back of its chips as well and goes a step further by showing an inspiration photo to help you visualize how the colors work together in a real room. That visual context can be a time-saver when you’re trying to picture how a palette will read in practice.

Behr, Home Depot’s other major brand, takes a different but practical approach. Rather than packing each chip with suggestions, Behr offers perforated holes so you can build a custom fan deck of your favorite swatches. The cards are designed to be assembled on a ring that the brand supplies, which makes comparing many colors side by side much easier during the decision process.

Features at Lowe’s and Valspar

At Lowe’s, Valspar’s chips include pre-cut squares that let you isolate a small area of the swatch to compare directly to fabrics, cushions, or other items you already own. That feature is particularly useful for matching a pillow, curtain, or upholstery to an existing paint color. We’ve used this method for touch-ups in the past and found it made matching existing paint surprisingly precise and nearly undetectable.

What about other paint retailers?

We didn’t visit specialty retailers like Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore during this quick tour, but the fan decks we keep at home from those brands generally don’t contain the same built-in extras noted above. Those companies tend to support color decisions with separate booklets, seasonal palettes, and in-store resources rather than adding features directly to each card. In many cases those pamphlets contain plenty of inspiration and are still very useful when planning a room scheme.

Extras are helpful, but not essential

Ultimately, extra features on paint chips are nice to have rather than essential. The most important factors remain color quality, coverage, and how paint performs on walls and trim. That said, brands that include simple tools for visualization, coordination, and organization can save customers time and reduce uncertainty during the selection process. Whether it’s coordinating trims, suggested ceilings, fold-over swatches, inspiration photos, or perforated fan decks, these small innovations make a real difference for people who want confidence in their color choices.

Have you discovered any useful paint-chip features?

Have you come across any particularly helpful extras from a paint brand, in-store department, or website? Have you used fold-over suggestions, icons for room-to-room cohesion, pre-cut comparison squares, or other features to guide your color choices? We’d love to hear which features have worked for you—and whether you’ve tried the new Martha Stewart Living Paint line and found it as helpful as we did. On our visit, even a Glidden delivery associate remarked that the new Martha chips are impressive, which felt like a notable compliment coming from someone stocking a competing brand.