Choosing Exterior House Colors

As a realtor and color consultant I constantly observe and critique houses as I walk my neighborhood or as I arrive in any neighborhood to meet clients. I hate to say it but, in my neighborhood alone at least 50% of the houses could have done better choosing their roof or body color.
In this blog I share a few of the mistakes I have seen and the remedies.
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1. ​The Problem: Top Heavy Roof ​

This client called me after purchasing her house. It had a brand-new roof chosen by the previous home owner. Unfortunately, the very visibly large roof with the light-colored brick, trim, garage door, wrought iron, trim and shutters felt like it was weighing down the house. It wasn’t in the budget to repaint the bricks or replace the roof so my suggestion was to add some dark where we could to balance out the weight of the color of the dark roof.  Another issue was the light green color on the house was not appealing to the current owner.  
The Solution:

1. We painted the trim to match the garage door thereby raising the height of the walls rather than adding a dark color which would have given even more space to the roof.
2. To add some visual weight to the house, I chose Urbane Bronze from Sherwin Williams as the color for the shutters and wrought iron. 

These next two houses are not my clients but houses I pass by frequently. In my opinion they could be improved by a color change.

2. The Problem: Roof Doesn’t match the House Color

This first house is a definite “don’t do this”. The creamy white/light yellow brick of the house as well as the red shutters are very warm where the roof is a very cool gray. It doesn’t work at all!

This first house is a definite “don’t do this”. The creamy white/light yellow brick of the house as well as the red shutters are very warm where the roof is a very cool gray. It doesn’t work at all!  
The Solution:
Either choose a new roof color that has warm undertones or repaint the body of the home a cool color. 

3. The Problem: Roof Doesn’t match the House Color
Although it’s not as bad as the previous home, this house that has wonderful curb appeal could be improved by applying the same principle of matching warms with warms and cools with cools. The green and yellow with the very warm bricks works so well in this case I would change the roof color to a warmer tone.

4. The Problem: The Garage Door Color and Garage Door Trim are Accentuating the Smallness of the Garage Door 

The Solution:
This is a case of color placement as well as the color. This house (also not my client) could make their home more harmonious by not accentuating the one car garage. Whether you like the blue of the trim or not is not the issue. The issue is using the blue trim around the one car garage.

When you use a trim color around the garage door that is different from the house color or the garage color you automatically make it appear smaller and bring the eye to it. In this case it’s already small so the goal would be to make it flow and disappear into the body of the house. In order to do that I would:

1. Paint the garage door similar to the body of the house. I would use the color strip that the house color is found on and either go slightly darker or slight lighter than the body color. The front door color appears to be an example of this. 
2. Paint the trim around the garage door the same color as the garage door to give the illusion a larger garage door.

The only way I would use white on the garage door (as they have done) would be if white was used elsewhere. In this case if the trim, the windows, the shutters and under the window (everywhere you see blue) were white then the garage door and trim around it would make sense to be white.

As always it is my pleasure and passion to help you with your home needs! If you are picking colors, a new roof or wanting to buy or sell a house please give me a call. I am here to serve you!

I was recently featured on Redfin offering the same suggestions. Their question to me was "what are the best paint colors for selling a house?" As you probably have gathered from this blog there is much more than just picking a color you like. You have to look at the other colors used already, the landscape, and the architecture before offering an actual color. Although I didn’t offer any color suggestions some others did so take a look. You can read the article here: “The Best Paint Colors for Selling a House in 2021” Redfin blog