As the saying goes, "There's someone out there for everyone." As an optimist and romantic, I agree — when we're talking about people. That same optimism does not extend to matching colors between materials, sadly.

I am often asked if there is a "perfect" match (furniture-wise) to a specific color in a person's home. Despite having vastly more color options than other furniture manufacturers, it seems like we often don't have the *right* color. On occasion, it's implied we're deviously hiding another 10,000 fabric colors behind our backs.

*sighs*

I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, but you're never going to find an exact match.

Do you have a favorite paint color? Are you looking for the perfect color match in a fabric? What about leather? You won't find it. It doesn't exist. Stop looking.

Before you send me an angry reply, let me explain why — and why it almost certainly isn't a problem worth stressing over.

The most important thing to grasp is that color is added to paint, fabric, or leather in very different ways. There are different complexities involved in manufacturing these materials, and the methods of production introduce market dynamics that will affect what you can get and why.

Paint is pretty easy to make in most hues — no, I'm not saying it's without complexity, but I've written articles about this for the biggest paint companies in the world, and it's comparatively simple. You've no doubt seen the process in action at your local paint store. Pick a color from a library of thousands. The store employee punches a code number into a computer. The computer tells them which base paint to select, they stick that can into a machine, and pigment is electronically squirted into the can. Mix it up, and you've got pigment particles suspended in a binder (acrylic, oil, etc) in the color of your choice.

Think about what this means for the logistics of adding new colors: A few tweaks to the proportions of pigment used, and you have an entirely new color. Give it a code number and invent a name for it, like "5295 Whispering Apricot," and you're done. There are no significant costs to adding new colors. No inventory management required. No real risk if the new color is a dud. It's truly "on-demand" production, with mere minutes of lead time.

Fabric and leather are not so simple. While paint can be almost any color imaginable because it sits on the surface — inert — fabric and leather colors must chemically work with the materials and survive heat, light, washing, abrasion, oils, and ultimately time.

Most fabric is colored by bonding dye molecules either physically or chemically to the fiber. The type of dye varies by fabric composition. Cotton utilizes reactive dyes, wool uses acid dyes, polyester uses disperse dyes, and so on. A color that works on cotton may be impossible on wool.

Rather than being made on a per-yard basis, fabric is finished in large quantities. Slight differences in temperature or pH impact the color, and each added color brings risks of inconsistency. Some colors are particularly difficult to reproduce with reliability — bright reds, violets, and turquoises are notoriously unstable. Industry-wise, repeatability wins over variety, with many mills simply refusing to offer colors that cannot consistently pass inspection.

Leather is even trickier. There are two primary methods of adding color to leather: dye and pigment. Dye (as seen on aniline leathers) reveals the character of the source leather hide. The hide density, fat content, and grain all impact how the dye is absorbed, which reduces the potential for consistency. Other colors, like bright whites, pastels, or super-saturated colors, usually require pigment (semi-aniline), which is a solid color that sits atop the hide. This last method can obscure much of the hide's original character in favor of a more uniform look.

The complexities of developing a new color for a given fabric/leather, being able to reliably produce it without failure, and the necessity of making each color in large volumes rather than on demand, one yard, or hide at a time, mean the range of hues found in fabric and leather will *never* be as broad as what's offered in paint. In many cases, technical limitations may mean a textile mill or tannery couldn't offer a given color even if they wanted to.

Is this the end of the world?

It really isn't. The mistake people often make is assuming a sofa is supposed to match a wall color in the same way socks match one another. As if the goal of a room is to eliminate all tension, variation, and visual interest until everything collapses into one large, tasteful, beige shrug.

But that's not how good rooms work.

When you chase an exact color match, three things can happen:

First, you lock yourself into a tiny target color that shifts every time the light changes. Morning light, afternoon light, lamps on, lamps off, cloudy day, sunny day — turns out that "perfect match" is now wrong six times a day.

Second, you flatten the room. A sofa that perfectly matches the wall doesn't feel harmonious. It disappears. Rooms need contrast, depth, and layers to feel alive. Slightly lighter, slightly darker, warmer, cooler — these differences are what make a space feel intentionally curated rather than copy-pasted.

And third, you miss the point of furniture entirely. A sofa is not a paint chip. It's a large, tactile object made of soft materials that age, break-in, and develop character. It should be present in the room, not camouflage itself within it. The goal isn't to make your sofa vanish. The goal is to make it look like it was chosen intentionally.

So if you're holding a paint chip up to a fabric swatch and feeling your blood pressure rise, take a breath. Step back. Look at the room as a whole. Aim for harmony, not duplication. The perfect match doesn't exist, but a great space absolutely does. Just give yourself (and us) a little more room to play.