The Color Digest · Compare
Settled, side by side
Faded Terracotta
Farrow & Ball · No. CC8
Terracotta after a decade in the sun
Costes
Portola Paints · Roman Clay
Plaster the color of a sunset in Marrakech
In real rooms
Every room, each colorCostes
1 roomThe difference
Read from the numbersBoth read warm. Both belong to the oranges family.
How they read
In their own wordsFaded Terracotta is exactly what the name promises: a clay orange that has been left in the light until the red drained out, leaving a soft, sandy peach. It comes from Farrow & Ball's California Collection, made with Kelly Wearstler, and it carries that West Coast ease — warm, dusty, never brash.
Costes is a Portola Roman Clay — a hand-applied plaster finish rather than a paint — in a dusty rose-terracotta. Because Roman Clay is troweled on, the color is never flat: it moves between pale pink and deep clay across a single wall, and the surface has a soft, suede-like depth that photographs like stone.