Tips to Use Colour on Your Home Exterior

Wondering how to use colour effectively on the exterior of your home? We have the top expert tips from the Selling Houses Australia team.

• Highlight architectural features: Use your exterior colour scheme to highlight key architectural features of your home, such as rooflines, guttering and doors. Create subtle contrasts, layers and depth by using varying shades of the one colour, or for a bolder look, contrast lighter shades with darker tones.

• Inspiration: Use your garden, driveway, guttering and landscape as inspiration for your colour palette, to create subtle contrasts and an overall sense of harmony for your property as a whole.

• Colour cautions: Be mindful when using darker colours on roofs and high beams as it can create a heavy look.

• Embrace colour to keep fresh: To create a focal point and give your home a strong presence, add a pop of colour to your exterior, such as painting your front door in a bold colour. One of my favourite combinations is using Taubmans Endure Poinciana Red to contrast against neutrals and whites.

• It’s not just about the house: Fences help frame the view of your house, and using a similar paint colour to the exterior trims creates a sense of connection between the house and garden. Also, I recommend using a dark charcoal colour to paint concrete pathways or driveways to create depth in your front yard, as dark colours recede.

• Match your palette to the house material: When painting trims and eaves of a brick house use the tone of the bricks as a guide for your colour palette. If you have a red/brown based brick, a cool grey or blue with create an instant contrast, whereas a warm neutral will help the trims and bricks blend with each other.

• Consistency: Always paint the walls and trims on the front and sides of the house in the same colour, as it gives the house a consistent look from the street at all angles. You can get creative with the back of the house, and paint it a different colour to suit the landscape or create a feature with a pergola etc. without compromising the look of the exterior.

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Taubmans Endure Exterior featured colours: Burma Buff (walls), Cotton Ball (windows and trimmings), Poinciana Red (door).

A traditional house, such as the one in this image, has a lot of exterior features like trims and rooflines, so sometimes it’s best to keep the palette simple and use colour to accentuate one key feature. Red is all about passion and excitement, and featuring it on your front door demands attention, while providing a sense of mystery about the interior beyond the front façade.

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Taubmans Endure Exterior featured colours: Alpine Snow, Grey Castle, Viking Grey

Strong lines in a building’s structure lets you create a dramatic colour scheme to match. Contrast in your walls and trims will highlight angles and features that you want to be the focus of your exterior. You can see in the pictured home, the different colours in the chosen scheme have been used to highlight different elements of the house, successfully accentuating key features.

For more information, go to www.taubmans.com.au