Calling on the Color Experts: need help with exterior colors!

19 days ago

Dear Houzzers:

Calling on color experts! We are painting the exterior of this rental house and I am really anxious about choosing colors.

I’ve done a lot of reading and I know it’s important to consider what direction the house faces. Our house faces WEST (front door side) and NORTH (garage door side).

The north side is in the shade A LOT.

We want to keep the stucco color light but not white. I think the values of the colors I tested are close to what we want: Agreeable Gray (LRV 60.5) and Anew Gray (LRV 47). SEE BELOW TESTS.

I tested Agreeable Gray and Anew Gray on both sides of the house. You can see agreeable gray reads very gray in the shade on the north side. I actually really like the Anew Gray, it reads taupe to me, but maybe that’s because of what’s behind it.

For sampling: The weather has been cloudy and with winter sun we haven’t been at the rental at the best time to capture the light.

Featured Answer

PRO

Lori A. Sawaya

18 days ago

last modified: 17 days ago

Chroma was next. You said you wanted a color that looked warmer than Mindful and Dorian Gray.

Colors have to be compared to each other in order to organize them into a system that categorizes them by hue, value and chroma.

We can leverage that.

Because colors also have to be compared to each other to determine warm/cool (psychological color temperature).

When we look at colors in color space ordered by hue/value/chroma, we see that colors in the same hue family change in perceived color temperature as they move away from the neutral value pole.

Because of where Agreeable, Dorian and Mindful Gray are in color space, we know that colors with more chroma will likely appear warmer.

Dorian Gray Chroma is 0.63

Mindful Gray Chroma is 0.70

So the Chroma range had to start off more than Mindful's 70. I thought 0.75 to 1.25 would be a generous range to search. The operation in the filter looks like this.