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EMAIL: contact@bluedoorpainters.com
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Architectural Exterior Accents in DC: Places to Put Your Color
Adding nicely painted shutters, an accented flower box or repainting your door are just a few ways to heighten your curb appeal in the DC area.
Blue Door Painters Discusses Parts of the House to Use for Accent Colors
An accent color is an essential aspect of any color scheme, and it is a critical element of establishing curb appeal. A color in your design scheme qualifies as an accent if you don’t use very much of it, and if you put it in a place that stands out in some ways from the rest of the architecture. A very well-tested design strategy involves using a color that is either unusually bright, or radically different from the rest of your scheme, as an edgy accent. Across the panorama of Washington, DC construction, there are five frequently found architectural features, visible from the road, that provide ideal spots to host an accent color. We’ve listed them, along with some suggestions for maximizing their effect, below.
1. Shutters. With urban roots in very traditional Georgian, Colonial, and Federal-style architecture, Washington DC and Northern Virginia have many buildings that pair plain brick or siding with shutters as the only adornment. While you need to be careful adding too much bold contrast in your shutters, since they actually cover a fair amount of visual surface area, playing with color in your shutters is an excellent way to manipulate your overall design without expending too much time or paint. If you have a window that stands out from the rest in any way, experiment with painting the shutters on that window only a more dramatic color to create the ‘eye-catching’ effect used by many realtors to help stage houses. Also remember that color can be used to contour the space: lighter shutters will make a window seem slightly larger than darker shutters. Have fun: the cool thing about shutters – and accents in general – is that they are easy to change. If you take a risk and don’t end up liking the effect, you can always paint over it!
2. Doors. Doors are a classic candidate for a bold accent color. First of all, they are centrally located, creating a natural visible focal point for the house as a whole. Second, they are symbolic: the entryway to a space is automatically assumed, on a subconscious level, to encapsulate its spirit. (This is why the doorways to many houses of worship are very ornate). Adding some energy in the door area in the form of a burst of bold but tasteful color shows viewers that the home is lively and engaging, not dull and listless.
3. Cornices. While most modern construction has a minimal amount of cornicing, many of the historic buildings in the city and its surrounding urban villages feature cornices added for both decorative and functional effect. The narrow horizontal lines provided by cornices often accentuate certain architectural features, and offer an ideal opportunity to add in a splash of color. If you do not have cornices, but want to take advantage of that horizontal accent style, you can look into creative alternatives like creating a stripe out of a single line of siding, or even painting your gutter!
4. Chimney. Many houses in DC have chimneys, primarily constructed out of brick. Sometimes they are located on one end of the house, and sometimes they come straight out of the roof, creating a little architectural crown. While you have to take special care when painting chimneys, both to ensure you use the right kind of paint to adhere to the masonry, and to make sure your paint job can withstand the added environmental stress of fireplace smoke, painting chimneys is an excellent way to add a splash of color. You can experiment with both painting the entire chimney, or painting individual bricks scattered evenly throughout. Just remember that visual balance is essential: strong color on one side of the house should be balanced in some way on the other, and strong color on the roof should be balanced by something (like a detail in the landscaping) lower down.
5. Planter Boxes. The good thing about planter boxes is: if you don’t have them, you can easily get them! Planter boxes are an easy way to alter the aesthetic of just about any design, and they are an excellent avenue for adding color. Living green is an excellent neutral: brightly colored planter boxes filled with blooming flowers or vivid foliage can brighten up almost any exterior, without looking gaudy.
Why Paint My Door Blue?
The Art of Painting Accent Colors for Washington, DC Area Exteriors
Imagine you are driving through a brand new development of luxury townhouses. You could be just off Montrose Road in Rockville, MD, or nestled up against Tysons Corner in Vienna, VA – the suburban growth of Washington, DC looks similar on either side of the beltway. Clean, spacious streets stretch before you in a neat grid, edged with trimmed lawns and sternly shaped boxwoods. Crouching behind the shrubbery are the townhouses, five of them in a cluster, each one trimmed with an identically subtle and tasteful combination of siding and natural stone veneer. The result is attractive and respectable, but for the most part it doesn’t deeply impress you. Something about the strict repetition in the colors and lines falls flat.
Until you get to the last house in the last cluster before you reach the cul-de-sac and have to turn around and head for home. That house, above and beyond all the others, truly catches your eye. It has the same lawn, boxwoods, and veneer as everyone else, but the siding has been painted a warm mahogany brown, the trim and shutters a lively cream – and the front door a startling royal blue. With a few planters of blue, purple, and yellow pansies in the windows and placed at intervals along the walkway, and a cheerful brass doorknob, this one townhouse launches itself into a decorative league above and beyond its identical cousins.
Curb appeal – the way a house impresses you when you first drive up and behold it from the road – plays a powerful role in how people (homeowners, guests, prospective buyers) experience a house. Psychological studies have shown that two houses with identical interiors will make significantly different impressions on the average viewer if they have differing levels of curb appeal. Psychological studies have also shown that color plays a strong role in determining the visual appeal of any space. Taking the fundamental wisdom of color coordination and applying it to the design of an exterior, we see how much a composition can be enriched by the addition of one wild, bold color, applied on a small but significant portion of the architecture.
That splash of brightness is referred to as an accent color in design lingo. The color scheme of any space – interior or exterior – should be composed of a ‘main color’ (which is applied to the majority of the “dead space” in the architecture – bare walls, siding, etc); a ‘trim color’ (or colors – which are applied to architecturally significant detail – window trim, shutters, porch or gable trim, etc), and then an ‘accent color’ (which is applied to only one architectural element, bringing that element emphasis in the composition). In most neighborhoods, the main color on an exterior needs to be subtle if it is going to match, and the trim color, while it can sustain a little bit more intensity, should also stay within a tastefully mellow range. The accent color, however, is where the design visionary can go a little wild. Provided that the hues you choose are well balanced on the color wheel (we expect to blog about the color wheel shortly, so stay tuned), and that the portion of the exterior that you choose to paint is both reasonably small and reasonably integral to the composition (the front door is a perfect example, although you can certainly use other parts of the building) an accent color that packs some punch will be sure to draw the admiring eye.
How do I get curb appeal?
Color Contouring: The Hot New Painting and Remodeling Strategy for Enhancing Exterior Curb Appeal
The little house on Robin Road was what one keenly perceptive open-house visitor called “an architectural disaster”. The bathrooms were small, the eaves of the Cape Cod sloped so steeply that both upstairs bedrooms felt cramped – and worse yet, the house had barely any closets. There was also some ambiguity about which was the front door; one opened to the side of the house, up an awkwardly steep staircase and walkway, while the other required opening the gate at the top of the driveway and walking across the deck. Yet the home sold, at the end of a tight bidding war, for $50,000 more than it was listed.
The real estate team who sold the house was a dynamic pair who specialized in creative, aggressive ‘staging’. ‘Staging’ means the setting up of a house for pre-sale display. This real estate team showed up at the little Cape Cod the week before it went on the market armed with several thousand dollars worth of landscaping and painting supplies, and the delighted homeowners watched as that initial several thousand returned them fifty upon the final sale.
Why were they so effective? Because they focused on curb appeal. By repainting and landscaping the home’s exterior, they made the little Cape Cod look positively enchanting when viewed from the road. The blooming azaleas and cherry trees went a long way, but the bulk of the burden of the home’s curb appeal was carried by the paint job.
Repainting an exterior is the surest way to achieve curb appeal. A new paint job makes a surface look exceptionally clean, lending the impression that the building is sturdy and well-kept. Also, the newly perfected technique of color contouring can contribute to making a home look bigger, more harmonious, and better constructed; three of the most important characteristics determining curb appeal.
Color contouring is based on the simple optical principle that light-colored objects look bigger, lighter, and more in the background, while dark-colored objects look smaller, heavier, and pop out into the foreground. Using this simple rule, a clever designer can essentially reshape your house with a new paint job, playing up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses to maximize your curb appeal. Follow the simple steps below for color contouring, and your house could gain as much as $50,000 in value from its curb appeal alone.
Color Contouring Tips:
1. Paint lower sections of your architecture darker than higher sections. Darker sections seem heavier, so it seems more stable to the eye to have them on the bottom, not vice-versa.
2. Paint spaces that you want to expand in slightly lighter colors than spaces that you want to shrink. If you have mismatched dormers, for example, painting the smaller one slightly lighter will help balance them visually
3. Pick a light shade for your main color. Light colors make surfaces look larger and more spacious, and in almost every case, the curb appeal is improved when a house looks larger.
4. Paint the structural details of your architecture (window trim, cornices, etc) in darker colors to make them stand out. Emphasizing structural features makes your house look more sturdy.
5. Paint your shutters in a lighter color. Lightly colored shutters will make your windows look bigger, which will increase curb appeal.
