Get FRESH With Your Roof

By Kate Smith, Sensational Color. 

Kate Smith offers a FRESH new way to find the perfect color for your exteriors. 

I love my career. Who wouldn’t? As the chief color maven at Sensational Color, I get to study colors and offer advice to homeowners on how to choose the best colors for their home exteriors. It’s a great job! 

When people ask me how to pick the best color roof for their home I have a special “go-to recipe for success.” I tell them to get FRESH with their home exterior. This includes evaluating the key essentials of your house. Let it “talk to you” and listen to what your home has to say. 

Learning the FRESH approach 

Go outside and think about these F R E S H aspects of your house: 

• Fixed features – These are the permanent design elements of your home that are a truly constant feature of your house, such as the foundation, partial stone or brick facades, pathways and retaining walls. Each feature may be of a different material, but they usually will have a common color or color cast. Once you identify that common color, you can find a roof tile with a similar color or undertone that will work well for the overall home. 
• Regional colors – West Coast? South? Midwest? Each region of the country has prevalent colors based on the housing styles, available materials, natural surroundings and the quality of light. Determine the colors in your area (often those you see a great deal of on other homes) to stick with regional colors. 
• Environment and surroundings – Is your home in a rural setting or a downtown? Are you near the waterfront, a desert or a mountain? Temper the colors on your home’s exterior to complement your surroundings and the natural colors around you. The goal is to stand out while still fitting in! 
• Style of the home – Remember that roofing colors should support your home’s style and architecture, not the other way around. So, determine your home’s style (are you a Ranch? Tudor? Victorian? Art Deco? Greek Revival?). Then research online to determine what colors are most associated with your style of home. 
• Have-to-use colors – If you live in a historic district, check for local guidelines and/or restrictions on adding colors to your home. More traditional colors, such as whites, browns and shades of blue and green, work well on historical homes. 

Finding your color 

As an example of using the FRESH approach, I coached homeowners in Arizona to work from the “top down” when selecting new colors and products for their home. 

After discovering the reddish tint to the stone setting around the property I suggested a Sonora blend of colors found in DaVinci Bellaforté® Slate composite roofing tiles. This combination of colors includes shades of medium and dark terracotta mixed in with light and dark clay tones. Together it creates an earthy color that works perfectly on this home and helps it stand out in its shaded tree setting. 

On a completely different house in Texas, the homeowners were set to go with a DaVinci Single-Width Slate Black roof to complement their expansive brick house. That’s a really good choice. However, when we truly looked at their house, we decided a Castle Gray slate color “warmed up” the home. It softened the overall home and didn’t appear as severe. The FRESH approach helped them see that their environment and regional setting were perfect for the gray tone. 

FREE color support 

Ready to dive in and get FRESH with your home? I have several free e-books available online that offer FRESH home exterior color advice. And, if you’d really like to see what your home can look like with a colorful new roof, then try out the Top Down Color™ Visualizer from DaVinci Roofscapes! 

Have a question? AskARoofer.   

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