How to Choose the Best Siding Color for Your Home’s Exterior Remodel

A home’s exterior is its face, revealing its style and warmth to the outside world. Therefore, choosing the right siding color for your Roswell, Alpharetta, Dunwoody, or Woodstock, Atlanta, Georgia, home’s exterior is essential in making a great first impression when remodeling the home you love.

This blog is about choosing the best siding color for your home. There are many things to consider when selecting. Below, we cover various architectural, color and design rules to follow so you can choose a siding color you will be happy with for years to come.

 

1. Know Your Home’s Design

The first point to consider when choosing your home’s siding color is its style. When renovating, it’s crucial to identify the style category of your home. There are a wide variety of home styles across our Roswell, GA area.

Common house styles and their best color options

Craftsman: 

• Front porch – adding charm and providing a warm and inviting quality
• Low-pitched, gabled roof – boasting decorative supports
• Tapered columns – making Craftsman style homes visibly and physically sturdy
• Double hanging windows – improving the view and increasing the amount of natural light

These homes have recognizable architectural features, with gabled roofs that typically have exposed wooden beams or rafters. Originally designed to showcase hand-made wooden design details, craftsman homes typically have wood or wood-like siding that coordinates with the overall artisanal feel.

Since the craftsman style emphasizes natural elements, it’s common to find these homes with earthy-hued siding in colors like tan or sage.

Colonial:

• Rectangular shape
• Gabled roof
• Symmetrical windows
• Wood, brick, or modern vinyl siding

Colonial houses are built in a traditional style of architecture that dates back to the U.S. Colonial era. They are known for their strong geometric and symmetrical shapes, with a focal point on the front door. They feature prominent windows paired with shutters.

Colonial homes often feature light-colored siding with darker accents, helping these details stand out. Traditional colonial homes range in siding color from white to beige to blue to red.

Victorian: 

• Two to three stories
• Steep, gabled roofs
• Intricate woodwork
• Towers and turrets
• Rich colors

Victorian-style homes became popular during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and are characterized by Gothic influences and intricately designed woodwork. These homes often have pitched roofs, wraparound front porches, cylindrical turrets, and roof towers.

Victorian house siding often features playful and charming colors, including bold purples or blues.

Mediterranean: 

• Arched windows and doors
• Wrought-iron details
• Clay roof tiles
• Stucco walls
• Spacious outdoor living areas

Although this home style is rare in our area, it should still be included. With ties to historic European architecture, Mediterranean-style homes are reminiscent of sun-soaked, seaside locales. The elegant exteriors often feature elements such as red roof tiles, stucco walls, arches, and enclosed outdoor spaces.

Standard siding colors on Mediterranean homes include oranges, yellows, reds and browns on one end of the spectrum and bright whites and blues on the other.

Farmhouse: 

• Simple, rectangular or square floor plans
• One or two stories high
• Practical, straightforward design
• Natural building materials like wood and stone
• Ample outdoor space
• Large functional porches
• Pitched roofs with dormers

The past decade has seen the resurgence of farmhouse architecture, with many designers modernizing this house style by making clean and refined design tweaks.

Today’s updated farmhouse look emphasizes simplicity, focusing more on a neutral color palette of whites, ivories and light grays across the exterior siding, trim and accents.

Contemporary:

• An irregular, asymmetrical façade
• Strong emphasis on geometric shapes
• Large windows
• Clerestory windows
• Use of recycled building materials
• Mixed materials on the exterior (e.g. wood and stone)

These properties are recognizable by their asymmetrical, low-pitched roofs that coordinate seamlessly with the home’s siding, window trim and other accents. A popular aesthetic for modern contemporary homes is to make the home blend in with nature, emphasizing a more sustainable approach to homebuilding.

As a result, many of today’s contemporary homes will pull in a natural color palette with wood-colored roofs, siding and accents.

2. Match the Neighborhood’s Style

If you reside in a tightly packed neighborhood, make updates to your home that complement the houses on your street. Choosing a siding color that clashes with the theme of the neighborhood can interrupt the street’s cohesion. Instead, carefully consider the flow of your street and how your home can integrate with the overall feel.

This might be a challenge in neighborhoods with varied home styles built over time according to that period’s trend. In this case, you can’t go wrong with choosing a modern, contemporary neutral palette, whether in cool or warm tones. Find the nearest home or homes closest in style to yours and try to coordinate with those while also respecting the colors of your direct neighbors’ homes.

If you’re making siding color updates in a newer neighborhood where all the homes were built around the same time, it can be much simpler to determine an overall color scheme and work with it.

3. Think About Current Trends

When updating your current home, it is wise to consider some of the latest color trends to ensure your home is up-to-date with the latest styles.

Popular house siding colors and color schemes:

• Bold colors: In recent months, more homeowners are opting for vibrant color combinations, using their home’s exterior to showcase statement-making hues. Some homeowners want to break away from traditional color pairings to enjoy bold blues, greens, charcoals, and black.

• Pastels: Along the same lines as trying out bold colors, many homeowners are ready to bring back a cheerful vibe to their neighborhood by choosing to paint siding in warm pastels — pale yellow, green and blue.

• Monochromatic color scheme: Another new siding color option is the monochromatic look. To achieve it, select one primary color that will be used throughout the siding and on the trim and accent pieces. The accent color can vary slightly in the shade to add a bit of contrast, but the look remains seamless overall.

• High-contrast: Like the monochromatic style, an opposing trend is also rising — high-contrast exteriors are becoming more popular, especially in contemporary- and farmhouse-style homes. With the high-contrast look, you choose one dark color and one light color, segmenting each across your home’s exterior. Popular high-contrast color combinations can include classic black and white, charcoal and light gray or dark brown and sand.

Having your siding follow a current color trend gives your home a polished feel and

can help increase your resale value, as most home buyers want to buy homes requiring minimal updates.

 

4. Compare Warm vs. Cool Colors

When choosing different home siding color options, the best idea is to familiarize yourself with the basics of color theory. As the set of guidelines designers use to select colors, color theory has essential rules to follow in choosing color siding options that will look great for years to come.

 

One important idea in color theory is warm vs. cool colors. The color wheel is the visual representation of all colors and is split into two sections. One side represents cool colors, and the other side represents warm colors. If you take the basic colors of the rainbows, cool colors consist of green, blue and purple, while warm colors consist of red, orange and yellow.

When selecting the color of your house siding, the basic rule is to use colors that cooperate on this cool vs. warm spectrum.

 

 

Select shades with undertones that work together

 

 

5. Select Accent Colors

A complete color scheme that includes your accents is essential when selecting house siding colors. A full-color scheme can consist of one to two different siding colors and one or more accent colors. These additional colors help define a house’s architectural details, drawing the eye to specific focal points and highlighting the unique shape and geometry of the home.

The accent points on a home’s exterior include:

• Shutters
• Window trim
• Front doors
• Columns and pillars
• Porch railings and steps
• Exposed beams and rafters
• Eaves and gables

Depending on the color trend you’re using for your home’s exterior, you may choose an accent color in either complementary or contrasting colors.

An example of a complementary color combination is red and green. Alternatively, contrasting colors are two colors that differ in shade or tint. An example of contrasting colors is black and white.

Notably, one of the best ways to create a beautiful color scheme for your home’s exterior is to choose a contrasting color for your shutters.

Various siding and shutter color combinations help tell your home’s color story, enhancing curb appeal.

6. Look at Landscaping Styles

One of the often-overlooked ways to choose the best color siding for homes is to assess the landscaping. Your home and surrounding environment must coexist harmoniously, not clash. That’s especially important when doing home renovations and upgrading existing siding. Therefore, you’ll need to consider some of the current style factors in your landscaping and hardscaping to integrate your home’s style.

Factors to consider about landscape style when choosing your house siding color

• Landscape material: A home’s landscaping acts as the canvas for the rest of the yard. Whether your yard is covered in a blanket of rich green lawn or installed drought-friendly gravel, you want to ensure that your siding color coordinates with the most prominent yard color.

• Greenery: If your landscape features an abundance of lush green trees and shrubs, you may be inclined to opt for a more organic color combination that honors the prominence of your yard’s natural influences. Conversely, a striking combination is encouraged if a more subdued and stark landscape surrounds your home.

• Flowers: Brightly colored gardens can be balanced by more muted or neutral home design colors. If your landscaping consists of a few flowers or smaller, earthy shrubs, you might lighten things with a bolder exterior.

Achieve a cohesive design by selecting a siding color that enhances your yard’s natural beauty

7. Consider How Lighting Affects Colors

How our eye perceives color is affected by the amount of light available. In other words, colors can look dramatically different at different times of the day depending on the amount of direct sunlight your home receives.

The best way to choose between options for your home’s siding color:

• Obtain samples of your top siding color choices and place them on one side of your home. 

• Check back throughout the day to see how each color looks.

• Make notes comparing the different colors and whether they became darker, lighter or lost their depth as the sun pattern changed.

It is recommended  to try the color before you commit so you can be sure of your decision before

investing time and money in your new siding color.

8. Coordinate With Your Roof Color

When replacing the siding in your existing house, it’s a good idea to consider your roof material and color. Some housing styles, such as craftsman, colonial and contemporary, tend to feature roof architecture prominently as part of the overall design. The eye will be drawn toward the roof more in some designs than others. The more prominent your roof, the more important it is to coordinate your siding and accent colors.

Depending on the color scheme you’re going for, you may choose a siding color that contrasts against a darker roof shade.

Contrasting Colors

White Siding with a Charcoal Roof

Alternatively, if you’re designing your home to achieve a monochromatic look, you might choose a siding color that’s in low contrast to your roof colors.

Low Contrasting Colors

 

 

Contact Home Wizards Remodeling for Help Selecting Your Siding Color

If you’re ready to replace the exterior siding of your home for your Roswell, Alpharetta,Dunwoody, Woodstock, Atlanta, Georgia home, Contact Home Wizards Remodeling today at 770-998-1809. We will enhance your home’s outdoor exterior with the color schemes you have always envisioned!  Besides replacement siding, we can upgrade your home exterior with our professional gutter, roofing, painting, window replacements, decks, patios, and outdoor living services.