Organic Modern vs. Pacific Haze

The same tide pool.  The overcast sky.  The same stretch of coastline ot Point Dume in Malibu, California.

Two completely different rooms.

That’s the premise behind Found Palettes, our ongoing design resource series that pulls color stories directly from photography.  Not from trend forecasts.  Not from paint chip displays.  From moments.  From light.  From the specific quality of a place at a specific time of day.

This post is a closer look at two palettes drawn from a single photograph – Ch. 01: Organic Modern Malibu and Ch. 02: Pacific Haze – what they share, how they diverge, and why understanding the difference actually helps you design a better space.

The Source Image

Both palettes originate from the same photograph: a low-angle view of the Point Dume tide pools on an overcast afternoon. The water was flat. The rocks were wet. The sky was that particular California gray that isn’t cold – it’s just diffused, like the light is everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.

In the photograph, you can see both of these palettes simultaneously. The warm tones live in the kelp-stained boulders, the sand-colored surf foam, the bleached rock faces. The cool tones live in the water itself – that blue-gray you get when the Pacific is reflecting nothing but cloud.

What Found Palettes does is separate those conversations. One palette per chapter. Each one a cohesive design direction.

Ch. 01: Organic Modern Malibu

The short version: Warm, tonal, refined. A soft modern with texture doing most of the work.

Organic Modern, as a design style, is frequently misunderstood. It isn’t the absence of modern. It isn’t just “modern but warmer.” It’s a specific sensibility: clean lines that have been allowed to relax slightly. Precision that tolerates imperfection in the right places.

This palette pulls from the rock and surf- the warmer register of the image. The whites here lean yellow. The grays are unmistakably gray, but carry a warmth you’d feel before you could name it. Nothing in this palette is cool. Nothing is trying to startle you.

Ch. 02: Pacific Haze

The short version: Cool, layered, forgiving. A more rugged coastal sensibility built for real life.
Pacific Haze leans into the blue register of the same image – the watercolor quality of a gray Pacific sky reflected in flat tide pool water. These aren’t the navies and whites of a traditional coastal palette. They’re muted. They’re a little muddy, in the best way. Misty, layered, slightly obscured – the way the coastline actually looks on an overcast afternoon, not how a paint company would render it.

The technical origin of this palette: it’s generated from the inverse hue values of the Organic Modern palette. The Photoshop workflow is a+ 180° Hue/Saturation shift applied to the source colors, which swings the warmth to cool. But these are still colors you could pull directly from the photograph – they live in the water, in the sky, in the wet shadow of the rocks. The inversion process surfaces them, it doesn’t invent them.

How They Work Together

Here’s what we want you to take away from this: these two palettes aren’t competing. They’re designed to coexist.

A home could be entirely Organic Modern – refined, warm, tonal, controlled.

A home could be entirely Pacific Haze – layered, cool, collected, forgiving.

Or a home could be both. The two palettes share the same source image, which means they share an underlying material logic even while pulling in different directions. An Organic Modern living room and a Pacific Haze bedroom can share a hallway without fighting each other. The harmony is already built into the methodology.

What the two palettes do is give you a framework for thinking about what kind of life a space is designed to hold. Organic Modern asks: What do we want to feel when the room is at its best? Pacific Haze asks: What does the room need to absorb while we ‘re actually living in it?

Neither answer is wrong. In fact, the most livable homes usually need to hold both questions at once.

A design resource that started with a feeling.

Can a moment become a room?

That’s the question Found Palettes started with. Not a series concept, not a content strategy — an experiment. I wanted to know if the places that stopped me when I was traveling — the ones that felt calming, or quietly inspiring, or just unexpectedly right — could actually translate into a design direction. Into a color palette. Into a material story. Into a whole house.

I’m not a vibrant designer. That’s not a disclaimer — it’s a description. The things I’m drawn to are nature-driven and tonal: the warm end of the grays, the muted blues and greens, the colors that feel less like a choice and more like a condition of the light. I appreciate bold, saturated interiors. I genuinely do. But that’s not how I read a space, and it’s not how I design one.

The way I think about it: architecture is the framework. It’s the foundation. And the foundation’s job isn’t to compete with what goes on top of it — it’s to support it. So when I’m designing a home, I’m building a base that’s steady enough to hold everything else. The vibrancy comes from the art on the walls. The collections. The people. Those things are personal and specific — they don’t need the architecture fighting for the same territory.

Found Palettes is that philosophy made visible.

A moment first. Always a moment.

The series starts somewhere specific: I’m looking for the moments that made me stop.

Not a Pinterest board. Not a project I admired. A moment. A place where I was traveling or exploring and something about the light, the color, the texture of the environment just — landed. That stillness. That quiet feeling of this is exactly right.

Those moments were already in my camera roll. I just needed to look at them differently — not as travel photos, but as design directions waiting to be named.

Found Palettes is where that practice landed.

How a palette actually gets made

I’ll walk you through the process, because I think it demystifies something that can sound more abstract than it is.

What comes next

This series will continue to grow. Each volume draws from a specific place and a specific set of photographs. Each chapter within a volume is its own palette, its own named style, its own set of materials.

The full palette for each chapter — hex colors, material pairings, and application notes — is published as a companion carousel on Instagram at @larcdesignco. This blog is where those palettes get the longer treatment: the context, the methodology, the why behind the choices.

If you’re in the middle of designing a space and you’re not sure how to name what you’re after — start with a photograph. Start with a moment. The palette is already in there.