Modern house, T&G TK cedar with bronze roof and tan windows?
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Patricia Colwell Consulting
2 years agoDEAR HOUSE LOVE Woman Owned Design/Build Firm thanked Patricia Colwell ConsultingRelated Discussions
Colors for old houses???
Comments (9)Your house is very attractive! A few things occur to me: the first is that you may not be able to repaint the clapboards if they have been long-exposed to weather, as it looks in your photograph. Wood gets roughened, dried out and damaged by exposure to sun in ways that may require enormously complicated refinishing in order to get it smooth enough for paint to properly adhere. Stain may be a better bet if you intend to keep the clapboards. If you plan to re-side the entire house, then of course you can have any color you like applied to the new wood. Secondly, for colors you need to decide if you want to go with the original palette for mid-19th c houses, or whether your eye has been accustomed to the Neo-colonial palette that was in vogue at the turn of the 20th century and painted on many older houses as a way of updating them. If you decide to explore authentic 19th century colors, then you need to think about the house in its local context. Obviously deeply rural houses were not quite up to the minute of style then, any more than they are today. So local preferences may narrow your choices considerably. Although many NE farmhouses were painted white, there was an aethestic movement afoot in midcentury that advocated painting rural houses any color except bright white which was aptly described as blinding. A J Downing, for one, wrote extensively trying to persuade owners to paint their houses in more muted drabs and tans taken from the color of local soil and ripening fields. Some of these colors look OK to modern eyes, but some are downright depressing! A modern author and historic color expert is Roger Moss. He has written at least two useful books on this subject. I am not at home today so I can't give you the exact citations, but if you look him up in Amazon or Alibris, you'll turn up the titles, no doubt. I live in northern NY where farmhouses are mostly painted white, like mine was when I bought it. My 1840's house appears to have once been painted deep barn red (or perhaps the siding was recycled from a red barn, it's hard to tell). When I chose paint for it I decided to develop a visual "pun" on its Greek Revival style. I spent a good deal of time in Greece many years ago and I have carried with me a color memory of the Acropolis late in the day when the lowering sun turns the aged marbles into a warm, slightly pinkish color. So I created a custom color (using full spectrum paint mixing techniques) that is a tricky optical illusion. It appears to be a light, warm, cream color when looked at from a distance of about 10-50 feet. Beyond that distance the mass of the building begins to "read" as a very pale pinkish tan color that to my eye exactly matches the Acropolis in the late afternoon. And as the sun goes down here, the building glows warmer and warmer, just like the old marbles that the Greek Revival style was originally based on. I started building the color from samples of dried grasses that grow in my fields, so its underlying tones satisfy the mid-19th call for less glaring colors, while still staying in keeping with the long-popular country white look for farmhouses in my neck of the woods. And at the same time it amuses me because it a harks back to my childhood visits to Greece, while reminding me that most good design ideas are in a perpetual state of reincarnation. I used a cool, stone-ier white for the extensive, typical GR trim. I intend to paint the outside of the window sashes a deep, deep, blackish green, in imitation of a 19th-c American practice. The front door is now a too-light, and still under review, color that was intended to look like dark oxidized aged bronze - another 19th c GR conceit. The blinds (Shutters) will wind up that color, too, but until I get it right on the doors I'm not painting the @#$%&^%#@!? shutters as they are miserable to repaint if I don't get the color exactly right! I have gone into detail here on my extended color project to illustrate that after you have studied your house in its own surroundings, the local traditional palette, and the ebb and flow of truly historical color selections (as opposed to what is marketed as "colonial" shades), you should still feel utterly free to select any color that pleases your emotional sense of home and tickles the rods and cones deep in your eye just the right way. I'm certainly not suggesting you go this far in personal expression, but in a town near me a homeowner, angry at what she felt was an unfair decision in a zoning matter, painted her house (which is right on the main drag) in several dozen loud garish colors with an angry repulsive devil face that covers two stories. While it is shocking, it has also turned into a tourist attraction and tour buses regularly stop to allow visitors to oggle it. Go figure. Have fun with your house! Remember, it's just paint. Molly~...See MoreExterior paint help on Craftsman mountain house with Cedar shakes
Comments (22)Chris your inspiration house has a large proportion of the natural cedar color to the blue and a lot of what we can see on that house in the photo is in shadow which makes a big difference. You're trying to choose a color for your house without a clean background - the yellow is a player in making colors look different. I took a picture of 2 colors from one of my paint decks for you - put them on a table on our porch that is similar in color to your cedar but when I compare the picture to the paint deck it's horribly off so I hesitate to post it for you. I may email it but just know that it's not representational at all. I'm looking at Benjamin Moore Everard Blue CW-575 and Wetherburn's Blue CW-580. these are from their Williamsburg collection, grayed blues with green in them. Even on the B/M website the colors are off on my computer. I'm not certain these are the *right* colors for your house but it's a slightly different direction that brings your setting into the mix and a place to start. Hale Navy is part of the Historical Color collection from B/M - that collection is a good place to be as well. The colors are dirtier which is good - what you don't want is a bright, clear color on your house. There are different ways to approach trim and house colors - they can be high contrast with crisp definition or lower contrast and more subtle transition. Neither one is better, they are just different looks but your trim will still be differentiated from the house body with less contrast. Are you planning to paint your eves and rake boards like the inspiration house?...See MoreDare I paint my house BM Hale Navy?
Comments (32)yeah, I think I like the cream w/the green. and the navy. But the more I look at that pic w/the dark trim, it kind of grows on me! I'd want more wood though. and maybe spruce up the landscaping. I suppose if you did a medium gray, you could do a dark charcoal trim. It just depends on the overall look you want. i do like the cedar posts though. and I'd prob add one or two more for symmetry it would be lot to redo all of the eaves w/cedar, but what if you stripped and stained them the cedar shade like the posts?? or you could do all of that jasper, but the underside the cream? or just the stiles cream? you'd have to play around w/diff looks...See Moreideas wanted! modernize mid century exterior
Comments (19)Agree — I would go in a more earthy direction, not too contrasting and stark. I think you’re very wise not to paint the brick. I’m just horrified as I drive through my town and see wonderful old homes with the Paint Color du Jour glopped onto the formerly nice brick, with no rhyme or reason ... just for the sake of being trendy. I like the darker roofline here, with a true golden tan (no pinkish cast), and front door in a different color. Minor changes that would make a big impact. Very inviting and more natural in keeping with the style of your house: Similar here:...See More
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