Two brothers and a palette of lime.

Portola Paints & Glazes was started in Los Angeles in 1998 by two brothers, Jamie Davis and Casey Davis. The company’s own account says the brothers were born and raised in the city and grew up in a family of artists, and that their father, a custom-home builder, mentored them. DIGS, writing in February 2016, named the father as Jim Davis, a high-end residential contractor, and said his explorations of Old World painting techniques helped to kindle his sons’ own interest in paint.

The two brothers brought different skills to the business. Business of Home, profiling Jamie Davis in February 2025, described him as the Los Angeles–based co-founder and said that Casey had worked on mixing natural pigments. According to the same article, the brothers combined their artistic talents in 1998 and launched the company with a palette of limewash paints made from water, pigments and crushed limestone.

That starting point is still visible in the company’s name and range. It trades as Portola Paints & Glazes, and lime wash remains one of the finishes it lists first on its website, beside the Roman Clay series and the more conventional paints that followed. The 2025 Business of Home profile was headlined as the story of a colour connoisseur who revives historic finishes with modern paints, and placed the brothers’ 1998 lime-wash palette at the start of that story.

The company has stayed in the hands of its founders. DIGS called it “family-owned” in 2016, and noted that the brothers still ran their own store and answered the phone themselves; Design News Now again described Portola as a family-owned, Los Angeles-based brand in February 2026.

Lime Wash, Roman Clay and a mixing room.

Portola’s range today is split between specialty finishes and more conventional coatings. On its website the company lists a Lime Wash series and a Roman Clay series alongside acrylic, exterior and enamel paints, primers and sealers, application tools, samples and fan decks, and a small line of apparel. Business of Home described Roman Clay as a plaster and the acrylic as a smooth finish, setting them beside the lime wash that the company began with. The website groups the acrylic, exterior and enamel paints as traditional coatings and the lime wash and Roman Clay as specialty finishes.

Where the paint is made is central to how Portola presents itself. The company says its paints are made locally, in small batches, at its Los Angeles headquarters, and that each colour is blended by hand; it describes itself as “nestled in the heart of North Hollywood since its establishment in 1998.” Business of Home reported in 2025 that the paints are made by hand in small batches at the North Hollywood headquarters. Nearly a decade earlier, in 2016, DIGS quoted Jamie Davis saying, “we source materials and make everything locally in Los Angeles.”

Colour itself is the company’s main product, and much of it is developed in conversation with designers. Business of Home reported that new shades often come out of talks with interior designers such as Jake Arnold and Athena Calderone when they need a colour that does not yet exist. In 2016 DIGS described Portola’s catalogue of hand-blended colour as one with “narrative and nuance,” and reported the launch of a collection called “Fade to Black.”

Shops are part of that story too. The 2016 DIGS profile mentioned a store on West Third Street in Los Angeles and a Hollywood flagship. In the 2025 interview Jamie Davis said he hoped to “establish storefronts across the United States.”

Paint brands in general.

The paint brands in this group sit at very different points in the trade. Some are long-established manufacturers whose names have passed through several owners, and whose cans are sold through hardware chains, dedicated stores and trade counters; others are younger companies that sell mainly online or from a handful of showrooms, often built around a short, edited list of colours rather than a vast library.

A paint brand’s identity is carried by more than a logo. It lives in the can and its label, in the fan deck and the swatch card, in the names given to colours, in the store or website where people choose them, and in programmes that pick out a colour for the year. Because the company behind a name may have been sold, merged or closed, and because paint can be made far from where it is marketed, the plain questions are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where the paint is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A paint company that sells its own process.

Portola’s identity, as the company and the press describe it, is built from a short list of words: lime, clay, pigment, hand-blended, small batches and Los Angeles. Its website gives prominence to its finishes, its colour samples and its fan decks, and to the family story of two brothers and their father.

Partnerships have extended that approach. In February 2026 Design News Now reported that Portola had launched a curated collection of wall colours with Lulu and Georgia, the online home-furnishings retailer founded by Sara Sugarman. The colours named in the report included a soft green called Aberdeen, a sunny Patisserie and a neutral tan called Terra, and each was offered in ultra-flat, eggshell and semi-gloss acrylic as well as Roman clay and lime wash. Jamie Davis told the publication that the two teams had worked together for months, “sharing references, testing samples and refining tones.” The collection now appears on Portola’s own website among its finishes.

The thread running through the sources is continuity. DIGS in 2016, Business of Home in 2025 and Design News Now in 2026 all describe a company still run by the Davis family; the company still says its colour is mixed by hand in Los Angeles; and it still sells lime wash, the finish it began with in 1998.

For a design guide, Portola Paints shows how a small paint company can build an identity from its materials, its city and its way of making colour, rather than from a mass-market campaign. Compare Dunn-Edwards, another Los Angeles paint maker, and Clare, a design-led American paint brand sold direct to customers. For this guide we use lime chalk, terracotta wash, olive clay and charcoal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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