My beautiful house is painted with the same all over white trim that's used on most red brick houses. It's cliche and boring, and that simply will not do. I've been looking at other houses collecting ideas and obsessing over what colours to use for months.
I've noticed that the best looking historic houses have three colours, and use two in the windows.
This one really shows the power of a darker colour in the window frame to improve even the bland colour palette of off white windows on red brick.On a detour through Kessler Park on my way home from Home Depot I found this red brick house with it's almost black blue trim and pops of stone. I love it.
It's unique without being flashy. It has a sophisticated country mansion sort of feel to it. Warm and rich; thick on the senses rich.
But how could I incorporate both the simplicity of the very dark blue trim and the well established superiority of having two colours on the window?
After weeks of wondering and pondering I read a comment online that said one way to incorporate more colours into a historic exterior while keeping it cohesive is use a darker or lighter shade of the same hue. BRILLIANT!!
So I decided to make the window's main trim and the awning a dark blue and accent the window frame with a dark red that is a similar but richer shade of the brick colour.
This book is how you get an exact brick colour. Well, this and bring in a brick. They generally hide these books behind the counter and you have to ask for them. They show ALL the colours, and it's a lot more than the selection of square paint chips on the wall.
I ended up after a number of paint samples deciding on the colours in the right side of this photo, the really dark blue and the dark brick red. It looks even darker from a distance. Now I just have to wait for the weather to get nice again so I can strip off the old paint and caulk, replace any rotted wood, recaulk, prime, and paint the windows one by one. Should be fun! Fun in an exhausting yet rewarding kind of way.
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