IT’S HARD to get excited about house paint.
It’s not sexy. It’s not fun. It costs a lot of money, and unlike a new wall-to-wall carpeting job, you can’t roll around on it and play a game of “Who’s Got Your Snout?” with the family dog.
Oh, sure, historically, people have had fun with house paint. Usually they’ve been politely referred to as “eccentrics,” who opted to paint their homes pink with purple trim before the home owners association had time to add a “tasteful house paint” clause to the neighborhood by-laws.
But times are changing. Because in the Bay Area, exterior home color, or at least the attention that’s paid to it, is enjoying a renaissance.
Wait. Check that. The attention paid to exterior home color isn’t enjoying a rebirth, it’s enjoying a whole new trend. For when it comes to color, local color designers are — in a painfully circuitous effort to bring things full circle — bringing sexy back.
“There’s absolutely been an uptick in this business,” says Jeanette Sayre, an Oakland color consultant who’s a relative newcomer to her field with two years of professional experience after years of consulting for friends. “I think people have become more sophisticated about color and don’t just do the straightforward stuff they used to do.”
While part of that adventurous sense has been encouraged by paint companies — palettes have been greatly expanded in the past years — geography also plays a part. There are vast differences between the Bay Area, say design experts, and other parts of the country.
“I’ve probably had more fun here in the Bay Area,” says Angelisse Karol, a professional color and design consultant based in Oakland with 25 years of experience. “On the East Coast, more colors look better outside, but then again, you have more conservative influences. Thereare only so many colors you’re going to put on a Colonial house. Here, though, there’s more variety in architecture, and a lot of the upscale architecture is revival, so nothing’s true. Nothing’s a true Tudor. Even bungalows are reinterpreted. So there are so many things that are a revival, are reinterpreted, that the architecture is a mish-mash — and that gives you flexibility with color.”
Despite the Bay Area’s forgiving architecture, color experts warn wanna-be house painters that there are several things to consider before deciding on a body color — the most important color with the biggest impact — for an exterior. And a major consideration is to evaluate what’s existing.
“The biggest mistake people make is when they work in a vacuum,” says Karol. “Evaluate what’s existing, what’s fixed: The color of your roof, your bricks or stones, your masonry, any landscaping that won’t change, the color of your neighbor’s house. Color affects color.”
Cass Morris, an El Cerrito-based color expert with more than 20 years of consulting work on her resume, advises homeowners to take their time and look at other houses in their neighborhood.
“Pick a color that complements, not clashes with or duplicates, neighboring houses — any color will look different when it’s as big as a house,” says Morris.
Another existing concern, which would seem unlikely to the novice color coordinator, are replacement windows. Over the past years, homeowners have been replacing windows with double-paned glass and many have opted for pre-fit metal types. What’s nice is that those windows now come in a range of colors. But what’s not nice is that many owners, sick of the standard colors, are choosing them in a pesky little color called sand pebble.
It’s a color coordinator’s nightmare.
“It’s a neutral taupe, but it’s very pink and it doesn’t go with anything,” says Karol, which a hint of disgust. “Those windows end up being a very expensive, fixed decision.”
Home owners should also consider their environment. The Bay Area tends to be a drier, less humid climate than other parts of the country where the moisture in the air helps the eye perceive the undertones in a color. That’s why in say, El Cerrito, on a bright sunny day, house colors can look all bleached out. On a gray, foggy day, though, those same colors seem richer.
For that reason, color experts recommend picking an exterior color when the light is extreme — like the summer.
“In the past couple of months people have been wanting to change it up and change colors, and it’s been when it’s gray and overcast,” says Karol. “Summertime is better to pick colors, though. You have that most extreme light which is the hardest on color. When it’s overcast or the sun is low, lots of things tend to look better. But if you drive around El Cerrito in summer, it looks completely white. The sun washes it out.”
The one fortunate thing making for an easier decision for home owners, though, is that unlike fashion, color trends in exterior house paints aren’t nearly so fickle. While color palettes have expanded, the vagaries of everything that impacts the perception of an exterior color, combined with the fact that a house-painting job generally lasts 10 years, makes for very long and often imperceptible trend cycles.
Instead, trends in house paints tend to be regional.
“The color schemes I put together in Fairfield for a home on several acres will definitely reflect the California landscape more than an urban condo building in San Francisco. An arts-and-crafts bungalow in Rockridge will relate more to its own garden and landscaping,” says Morris. “That said, I have found greens and taupes to be most popular in the last year.”
Sayre adds that any trends she finds are often influenced by commercial projects.
“They’re colors they’ve seen on shopping complexes and apartment buildings,” says Sayre. “But I personally recommend that people not follow trends too closely. If you didn’t like green before, you’re not going to like it now.”
If it all sounds confusing, then it’s obvious why color consultants, whose fees hover in the $100 per hour range and up, are so busy lately. After all, most of this discussion has been about choosing a home’s body color, and many consultants recommend up to three colors on a home, reserving accent features like front doors for real personality statements.
So what’s it all mean? In the end, it means the decision to paint a house is a real chore. A real, unsexy chore.
And remember, there’s one small vagary that to this point has gone unmentioned: What the neighbors will think.
“Someone asked me, ‘WHY can’t I paint my house purple?'” says Morris. “I replied, ‘You can, but gray it down a lot … or your neighbors will complain.”
Contact Bay Area Living writer Candace Murphy at cmurphy@angnewspapers.com or (925) 416-4814.
