After custom-built home designs, there’s no better way to make your Gateway home truly yours than by selecting its exterior paint colors. The colors of your home reflect your personal taste and tremendously influence its curb appeal. Yet there are many pitfalls to choosing the right exterior colors. Making a poor decision can lead to long-lasting embarrassment over colors that clash with those of your neighbors — and even an expensive bill for repainting.

To start, the surface area of a home’s exterior is very large, which makes it challenging to visualize the end result using only a brochure or those small paint chips. And colors appear very differently at different times of day, in bright light and shade. So how can you evaluate and choose exterior color properly? Read on for our expert tips.

How to Settle on the Right Colors

Pinpoint Your Style

Think about the architectural style of your home. Will your home showcase rustic Craftsman style, streamlined modern design or the welcoming charm of a farmhouse? Each style of custom-built home designs can be beautifully enhanced with the right choice of colors.

For Craftsman-style homes, lean into earthy and subdued tones such as olive, taupe, deep brown and russet to complement the frequent natural stone and wood accents. For modern homes, consider colors that boldly contrast and enhance the clean lines and angles. Warm and cool neutrals like white, beige, gray and taupe give off a contemporary vibe when paired with navy, charcoal or black. Farmhouse styles favor classic white, cream and gray but often add soft, muted accents for a natural aesthetic, such as sage green or pale blue.

Finally, consider your own personal style. Which colors do you gravitate toward? Do you prefer soft, muted tones or something bold and unique? If you choose a color that you don’t love simply because it seems to be trending, you likely won’t remain happy with that choice in a few years. Instead, opt for colors that resonate with you and your lifestyle (while taking into consideration the following tips).

Work With Existing Materials

There are some elements of a home that are fixed, such as stone or brick accents and the roofing material. These unpainted elements of your home’s façade must influence your choice of exterior paint color. You don’t have to match the color of brick or stone, but the neighboring paint color should either share an undertone or have an undertone that coordinates well with the brick, stone or roof. Most Gateway homes have accent material covering part or all of the front-facing side of the home, therefore the first step is to ensure that any paint color selected plays well with these materials.

Look at the stone or brick and the roof and determine which colors they contain. Stone may include undertones of pink, orange, yellow, blue, green, taupe or gray, which means you need to choose a paint color that coordinates with an undertone. For example, the stone on your home’s front may contain a blend of orange, taupe and dark gray colors, while the roof is a dark gray color. If you want to paint your home beige with white trim, choose a beige and a white with an orange or gray undertone for your siding — even if you’ve fallen in love with a color with a blue-gray or green-gray undertone.

The right choice of colors for your home will depend upon whether they coordinate with other elements on your house. This will prevent unfortunate color clashes that distract from its beauty.

Look Around the Neighborhood

Unless your home sits alone on a vast expanse of acreage, it’s important to think about how it blends in with the surrounding community. Consider the color schemes of neighboring homes. If a home next to yours is painted bright white, it’s best to pick exterior colors that complement it without matching exactly. Ultimately, careful consideration of color enhances the overall appeal of your neighborhood and helps to keep property values high!

If you want your home to stand out, a good rule of thumb is to choose contrasting colors but avoid colors that are overly bright, jarring or drastically different from those of other homes on the street. In addition, be sure to research any applicable homeowners’ association requirements related to exterior colors. Many HOAs have strict color guidelines to maintain a cohesive look within the community. Gateway is familiar with the HOA requirements of all the communities we build in.

Test Your Choices

Once you’ve narrowed paint and trim colors down to two or three good options, do an outside test. Get samples of the paint colors from Sherwin-Williams (our preferred paint vendor) and paint large swatches on poster boards. Take your boards outside, prop them up and stand back several feet to evaluate them. Because natural light varies at different times of the day, be sure to check the colors in full sun, shade and at different times to see how each appears as the light changes throughout the day. Also compare the color boards with any brick or stone on your house, and even against the roof and the concrete of your patio or sidewalk. The winners are the ones that work well together in all conditions!

Ask About Gateway’s Signature Color Palettes

By reflecting on the architectural style of your home, considering your personal preferences in color, evaluating the unpainted elements of the exterior and coordinating with neighboring homes, you can make educated exterior color choices that you will love for years to come.

At Gateway, we understand that you want your home to look beautiful, and choosing the right exterior colors is an important part of realizing that dream. To make the process easier for our clients, we have partnered with Sherwin-Williams to curate a selection of more than 20 coordinated paint palettes that suit a variety of tastes. From classic to contemporary, we have a palette to enhance the beauty of any of our custom-built home designs. When you build a Gateway home, our team can help you evaluate all the options and find the colors that bring your vision to life!

To talk about your next project, call our team at (307) 632-8950 or contact us online. Let’s start building your future today!