My painting company handles roughly 125-200 paint projects every year. This year we’ve ordered around 400 gallons of paint. To keep those orders organized, we use a simple order form we built with Google Sheets and email it to the paint store so nothing is misunderstood, which can happen with verbal orders over the phone. We also use these order forms as records that we can share with the customer so they have a record of what they used and where. It’s practical and useful.
I realized a few weeks ago that we also have something really interesting on our hands with these order forms: a record of exactly what homeowners in Delco and Chesco are putting on their walls.
The numbers below come from the part of our records that notes which town a job was in: 124 paint orders placed between October 2025 and June 2026, covering 183 color selections across 89 homes and 394 gallons of paint. It is a real sample but not a scientific one. It only covers people who hired us. Take it as a field observation, not a survey.
The Chester County slice is smaller still: 23 selections across 12 homes in West Chester, Kennett Square, Phoenixville, and Chadds Ford. I want to be upfront about that, because the Chester County pattern is the one I found most surprising, and 12 homes is 12 homes.
Chester County picked neutrals almost every time
In those 12 homes, the most common choice by a wide margin was greige, the warm gray-beige category that includes Sherwin-Williams Agreeable Gray. Agreeable Gray alone came up three times. After greige came warm whites and then straight beige and tan. Between them, those three families accounted for roughly two-thirds of everything chosen.
Color barely registered. Two bold selections in the whole set, and almost no green.
Now compare that with the Delaware County homes in the same file, 48 selections across 21 homes. There, blue, green, and a handful of near-black navies together account for exactly a third of every color chosen: 16 selections out of 48. Same period, neighboring counties, noticeably different taste.
Across the whole region, green is the story
Pooling all 183 selections, warm white was the largest single family at 24 percent. That is not news. Warm white is always the largest family.
Green came second at 18 percent, and that is news. Green now outranks greige, and it beats plain gray by more than three to one.
The specific greens matter, because “green” makes people picture something louder than what anyone actually chose. The recurring names were Clary Sage, Sea Salt, Rainwashed, Rosemary and Muted Sage. These are soft, dusty, half-gray greens. On a north-facing wall in February, several of them read as gray. Nobody in this file painted a room emerald.
Where the greens landed says something too. Bathrooms and bedrooms tied for the most, with kitchens behind them. Those are the rooms people treat as separable. You can paint a bathroom sage, and the rest of the house does not have to agree with it.
Gray is finished, or close to it
Straight gray came in at about 5 percent of selections. Ten out of 183.
For anyone who painted their whole house gray between roughly 2014 and 2020, that is worth knowing before you repaint. The market has moved to warmer, muddier colors, and the greige category is where most of that movement went. Greige lets people leave gray without committing to beige, which is why I think it does so well in Chester County specifically.
The most-chosen individual colors across everything were Alabaster (SW 7008), Accessible Beige (SW 7036), Agreeable Gray (SW 7029), White Dove (Benjamin Moore OC-17), Clary Sage (SW 6178) and Sea Salt (SW 6204). If you have looked at a fan deck in the last two years, none of those will surprise you. What might surprise you is how few colors account for how many rooms. Most people are choosing from a very short list.
The practical part
Two things I would tell a neighbor.
First, look at the sample on your own wall, in your own light, at the hour you are usually home. The soft greens especially change character between north and south light. A two-inch chip under store lighting tells you very little. Paint a large sample directly on the wall and live with it for a couple of days.
Second, sheen decides more than people expect. Satin and matte together accounted for most of what we painted this year. Matte hides wall imperfection better and is far more washable than it used to be, which is why it has taken over living rooms and bedrooms. Satin still belongs in bathrooms and kitchens.
If the Chester County pattern holds and neutral really is the local default, the interesting question is what happens in the rooms nobody sees from the front door. That is where the color has been going everywhere else.
Rick Sabatini owns Sabatini Pro Painting. The full color record, including the town-by-town breakdown and the ten colors chosen most often, is published at sabatinipropainting.com/paint-color-report. The company has served Delaware County, Chester County, and the Main Line since 2016, and its work is at sabatinipropainting.com.
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