How to Choose the Perfect Exterior Color Palette for Your Home’s Architectural Style
Many homeowners choose an exterior color by sticking a swatch card on the wall and squinting. Then, they list their house for sale, and the picture makes the home look completely different than it did in real life. Color and finish will perform differently for a cell phone camera than they do to the eye, with differences as significant as the paint itself.
Start with the architecture, not the Pinterest board
Pinterest is full of moody sage exteriors and warm terracotta facades, and many look fabulous. The problem is that the color palette lifted from a craftsman bungalow in another state may look wrong on your federation cottage or flat-roofed mid-century modern. Federation looks good in sage, cream, and terracotta because its brick and roof colors are part of that style’s DNA. Mid-century modern demands earthy oranges and browns to echo its low horizontal lines, while coastal builds want pale aqua and off-white because heavier colors would crush delicate windows seeking ocean views. It’s not that we should all be slaves to the period style, although we should; these color palettes make architectural details pop to both passersby and buyers. A wrong palette, however, will look like an afterthought, even if the individual colors are pretty.
Audit what you aren’t changing before choosing what you are
Before choosing any swatches, conduct a house tour and note all the surfaces you aren’t going to repaint; your roof tiles, brick, stonework, drive, any render that you intend to keep. Whatever you are going to leave be automatically limits your color options. A house with a terracotta roof is not the place to experiment with cool blue-gray body colors. Similarly, gray stone will overwhelm a warm beige color. Once you’ve done this audit, you’ll save yourself the heartbreak of falling in love with the wrong palette.
Undertone is the thorn in your side
Two paints that look identical on a swatch can be very different when placed next to your roof tiles or brickwork. One may be warm, and the other cool, and this difference can be difficult to see with the naked eye, but if you photograph them both next to your brickwork, the difference becomes glaringly obvious. Cameras will amplify the apparent color cast of the paint, but your eye is a good judge of the contrast needed.
Apply the 60-30-10 rule in reverse order
The 60-30-10 rule says to pick your body color first; we say pick your front door or accent color first. Accent color or front door color provides the tiniest detail that adds the most significant impact to a photo; the eye is immediately drawn to it. In a picture of your house, the most prominent detail is the front door, so it should always be your color choice starting point. Trims should be the next biggest chunk of color, followed by body color, which covers the most area. If you get this order wrong, your house will look like one big block of color with no contrast because the body color was chosen first and everything else was swallowed up to match it. There is also the financial argument; according to Zillow’s widely quoted 2019 analysis, homes with black or dark gray front doors sold for over $6,000 more than expected. So, your accent color is worth close attention.
Know the LRV before you commit to anything
Light Reflectance Value or LRV is a measurement of reflected light on a scale where lower percentages are dark colors and higher ones are light. This is the one technical detail every homeowner needs to know about when choosing exterior paint colors.
Paints with an LRV of below 30% will absorb light, creating rich and moody colors in your house, which is what you want. However, in photos, especially those taken in flat midday light, these colors will devour the shadows and swallow all detail, making your home look like a lump of concrete. On the flip side, colors with an LRV of over 60% reflect light back at the camera, picking up on detail the dark colors would miss. It doesn’t mean dark colors are off-limits; it means that you, the homeowner, need to know the LRV of your favorite color and research the house elevation it will be on before committing four gallons of paint to it.
Test on the wall, then test on the phone
A swatch card will give you no information. Buy a pot and test the paint on the house wall before photographing it and then looking at the thumbnail on your phone. Colors look surprisingly different at different times of the day, with neutral colors often tending towards blue by late afternoon.
If you are repainting a house for sale, this step is even more vital, as potential buyers will always see your home in a thumbnail. Note that the white balance of your camera will also affect the colors, so you may need to adjust this if your neutral color looks blue when using the ‘auto’ setting. Yellow tones can also creep into grays if you aren’t careful. If you are in the process of buying or selling, this step is worth your time.
It is also the point where most people are ready for a second opinion. Judging the condition of a render or weatherboard and recommending the appropriate sheen from a swatch card is challenging, so many people in Western Australia use Exterior Painting Services Perth to inspect the house before selecting the final color palette, ensuring the colors look good on the listed home. It is also a good idea to have your painting contractor check the shortlisted palettes against the rooflines, gutters, windows, and brick or stonework to ensure the colors complement those features and aren’t ruined by the wrong sheen.
Sheen dictates the color’s behavior
The sheen and color should be chosen together, as the two features affect each other. It is easy to overlook this point; flat paint will disguise brush marks, but its ability to absorb light will make it look much darker in a photo than the swatch suggests. Satin paint is middle-of-the-road and should balance out the colors on your shortlist; glossy paint looks fabulous in a photograph but will show every pimple on your wall and lose the color in the highlights.
North vs. south-facing: it’s all about the light
The color palette will look significantly different on a north-facing wall than it will on a south-facing one.
North-facing walls are bathed in warm light all day, so the colors on them look close to how they appear in a swatch or in daylight. South-facing walls do not receive direct sunlight for long and will always look cooler than the other walls in your house. Warm colors on a cold wall will appear less saturated and grayish; the same neutral color will look substantially different on the north-facing building than it will on the road-facing one. If a side of your house is more shaded or faces the road, test the darkest color in your palette on it first. This is also a good time to remember that the best time of day to photograph your house is during the golden hour, when the setting sun bathes everything in warm light.
Your climate determines how long your colors will stay fresh
Bright and dark colors tend to fade faster in sunny climates than light colors. This means that the house you are selling will look different in ten years than it does today, and the buyer will also notice this. Neutral colors tend to be light colors that reflect heat, meaning their faded versions will still resemble their non-faded selves. This can be essential in ensuring that property photos have longevity, particularly if the listing will remain online for a long time. For all the right reasons, the local council and overlay may also encourage you to use these less intense, more reflective palettes.
Run the thumbnail test before you waste money on pots
Once you have shortlisted your color palettes, conduct a thumbnail test to see if your potential buyers will actually see your house in the images. Paint a test wall of the house and snap a picture of it. Now shrink the image on your phone until it reaches thumbnail size, the size it would appear in a listing grid or someone’s social media feed. Does the house look like it stands out from its surrounds? Can you tell it is not one giant bland block? The colors you thought looked good in real life need to be pushed to look good in the reduced size and resolution of a phone camera. The saturation and contrast that looked just right in real life may need to be tweaked up to look good in a smaller thumbnail size.
Start with the architecture, audit what you can’t change, know the LRV, test on the wall and the phone, and your 12-step process is set to choose the right external color palette, which will look fabulous in both person and on the web.
