Colour, texture, fit with the surrounding homes, balance and landscaping - are all important considerations for a great looking home. Curb appeal is a big draw, and you can see why, it's your home's first impression! See? Here are some lovelies ...
There are all sorts of options when considering your exterior. This post is a run down of a few we've worked with successfully.
Wood. We first used wood in our first contemporary home. It was a good balance to the metal and stone that formed the rest of the home's exterior. Marine Board is often used in many contemporary projects. It's pricey, but really lovely. The first example is a bit out there, but the wood is a strong enough hue to balance the blue ... Marine board is nearly indestructible, given it's used for boats!
In the home we built below, we just used cedar planks, stained to the desired colour. Cheaper, but would need re-staining after a few years.
Because we tend toward more contemporary styling in our projects, we also use a lot of metal. It's practical, inexpensive and comes in a huge array of colours. One of our recent project used red metal to clad their addition and the results were wonderful. The red just really kicked off the brick, grey and black colours.
Corrugated metal and other types of profiles create great texture and again - colour. It's also on the cheaper and maintenance-free side of things, always a bonus. You can see the metal used here, against brick this time, on the back of our current home. This time the wood was a lighter shade. The metal we chose was a medium charcoal grey. I like them together.
Here's wood, brick and a bit of metal, again, this time on on the front addition of our current home. (The back addition is charcoal grey corrugated metal).
Brick is great, by the way, especially on older homes, or on those in a more traditional style. It's pricey though to work with especially from scratch. I also find it can sometimes look harsh unless it's mixed with softer or brighter colours. There are also so many shades of brick. The solid reddish brick and dark brown brick can be nice, but the pink and orange tones (like our current house, above) can be a bit yucky. I had to try hard to counter the brick colour with the mixed textures and the teal blue doors. It's not my favourite, but ya gotta work with what ya got.
The house we are re-doing currently is also a pink brick colour and to make things worse, the bricks are in bad shape. So we're opting to paint the brick a soft taupe colour. It's not often done - in fact, this is the first time we're doing it. There's a maintenance side to painting brick, but our painter tells us most good paint jobs on brick will last up to 15 years. In this case, we needed to fill in some doors and windows and matching bricks of this vintage are difficult to find. We have a bricklayer extraordinaire, Joe, and he tells us a match would be impossible. So, paint it is!
In another post, I'll cover stucco, cement board, siding and other finishes. Time to move on to
the "fun stuff" - the decorative touches that really finish the outside of a home.
Aside from the "big decisions" around exteriors, there are many smaller touches that feed into the final result. Front doors are huge for me. Look at these classics. Black is a perfect front door colour. But here it's also about the lighting, the planters and simple things like a great door mat with the homes address included.
But I always like a pop of colour. The next few are utterly charming and welcoming, They say "Come in! There are fun people living here, probably drinking wine!" (Or at least that's what I imagine..)
