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.