Working With Red Brick in Exterior Design

By Cass Jacoby. 

How to stop worrying and love the exterior design cues coming from the red brick on your home. 

Handling red brick in the exterior design can be tricky. If you own a home with red brick, you are probably familiar with how frustrating it can be to find a complementary color of roof that won’t clash with the brick, especially if you are thinking of upgrading to a brighter or more colorful roof. 

Chad Esslinger, a designer, suggested in this article, to ask yourself how you feel about your red brick. If you love it or feel neutral about it, then keep the red brick and coordinate your exterior to coexist with it. Brick is a large existing element that will impact the rest of your design, don’t try and coordinate the rest of your home around a design you dislike. 

Choose a roof that will be versatile and work with your existing exterior, but that will also fit should you decide to change the brick or siding colors in the future. 

If you want to keep your red brick, then you want a roof color that is neutral and lets the brick color make its own statement. Or you can double down on similar tones and include reds and oranges in your roof color for a lot of warmth. 

Chad recommends choosing a roof color that is dark and neutral or contrasting and cool. Both of these roof shingle colors look great with red bricks and complement a variety of exterior colors. 

If you need some visual inspiration, you can always use the Owens Corning Design EyeQ® software found on the Owens Corning website to try on different roof colors and see what speaks to you. 

Ultimately remember that your house is yours alone, if you choose a color choice that you love then you can’t go wrong. 

Have other questions about roofing color? Check out Chad Esslinger’s designer insights at Roof Color & Home Exterior Design Q & A | Owens Corning Roofing. 

Have a question? AskARoofer. 

Find your local roofing contractor in the RoofersCoffeeShop® Contractor Directory.

About Cass  

Cass works as a reporter/writer for RoofersCoffeeShop and AskARoofer. When she isn’t writing about roofs, she is writing about movies for her master's degree and dancing with her plants.