Your Guide To Choosing The Right Siding Color, According To Experts

These tips take the guesswork out of color selection—and instantly boost curb appeal.

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Published on August 5, 2024

Dorothy Shain Henderson exterior — Like the interiors, the front yard tells a story with roadside-rescue boxwoods and flowers inspired by Hendersonâs childhood garden. Photo:
JAMES RANSOM; STYLING: Veronica Olson

Sure, they say “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but houses aren’t books, and it’s hard to understate just how much your home’s paint color matters when it comes to immediate visual impact and curb appeal. We’ve all stood in the street and ogled a crisp white clapboard farmhouse or an inviting Craftsman painted a cheerful Williamsburg blue. But painting your home’s exterior siding is a big investment, and with a dizzying range of factors influencing your choice—architectural style, neighborhood aesthetic, the surrounding landscape and climate as well as your home’s unique combination of building materials—color selection, which seems simple on the surface, can quickly become one of the more stressful decisions. You might not be able to pinpoint exactly why a home’s color palette is so right, but it’s certainly clear when it’s wrong. To help you avoid a costly misstep, we turned to the South’s talented pool of architects, builders, and designers for advice on choosing the perfect siding color.

Meet the Experts

Leigh Misso is the owner of River Brook Design & Construction in Birmingham, Alabama.
Kirsten Schoettelkotte is the studio director at MHK Architecture in Charleston, South Carolina.
Patti Wilbourne owns interior design firm, PWD Studio, in Charleston, South Carolina.

Consider The Big-Picture Factors First

Personal Style & Preference

Naturally, you’ll want to choose a color combination that appeals to your individual tastes, and knowing what catches your eye from the curb is a great place to start. “Everything we do is custom and highly specific to the client,” says Kirsten Schoettelkotte, studio director at MHK Architecture in Charleston. “But it’s also very specific to the house itself.” In other words, just because you love green doesn’t automatically make it the perfect hue for your home’s siding—there are other factors at play.

Architectural Style and Period

Leigh Misso, the owner of River Brook Design & Construction in Birmingham, also encourages clients to take a holistic approach to exterior color choices: “Rather than just saying I want to paint my house green, think about what color combinations make sense based on your neighborhood and your home’s architectural style,” she says. Considering the architectural context of your home—whether it’s built in the Craftsman, Colonial, Contemporary, or Cape Cod style—doesn’t mean you’re bound to that particular historic color palette, unless of course you live in a neighborhood whose architectural review board requires it. However, context can help you narrow down possible color combinations to those that will amplify your home’s unique charms. Consider also how trim color may be used to highlight architectural details on the facade.

The Mix of Building Materials

“Taking into account all the textures and tones of the home collectively is really important when making a decision about siding and trim colors,” Misso says. “You really want to see how all those elements work together.” Consider natural accent materials like brick, stucco, and stone as well as roofing type and color and how they will inform your siding and trim color choices. “Maybe the roof pulls more blues, but your foundation material pulls in more reds, you’ve got to strike a kind of balance because there are certain things you can’t change with natural elements,” says Schoettelkotte. For a cohesive, visually appealing facade, these elements should complement one another not compete.

Exterior Design Elements

The colors, materials, and finishes that you choose for architectural features such as the shutters, windows, porches, front door, and foundation are particularly important when finalizing siding color choices as your facade can quickly slip from chic to chaotic if you aren’t thoughtful about your selections. Misso and Schoettelkotte both suggest that a good rule of thumb is to limit your exterior color palette to three colors or tones. “When you introduce a fourth it can make your home feel busy,” Misso says.

Acknowledge The Environment

Maggie Dillon Interiors_North Carolina Guest House — Photo: Anna Routh Barzin Styling: Kendra Surface

Get to Know Your Neighborhood

Your home’s physical address can influence exterior design decisions as much or more than the city or natural environment, and the first step in any exterior color selection process is checking to see if your neighborhood has an architectural review board, says Patti Wilbourne of PWD Studio: “These organizations are going to direct you or guide you in a way that is meant to make your choices work better with the surroundings of your home or the feel of a particular neighborhood.” There’s often a very specific color palette to work within, but even if your neighborhood lacks an architectural review board, it’s still important to consider the homes nearby. “I always look at the context of the home and how it fits into the neighborhood,” says Schoettelkotte. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to match everybody or do the opposite of everybody, though.” Neighborhood context simply provides a nice point of reference at the beginning of the selection process, she says.

Look at the Landscape

Whether your home is nestled in the mountains of North Carolina, perched on the coast of Georgia, tucked into the leafy hills of middle Tennessee, or sitting alone on the plains of the West Texas desert, the landscape is often the smartest place to seek out color inspiration. A wooded lot in Cashiers, North Carolina, or on the shores of Lake Martin, Alabama, call out for a more natural, even a darker color palette that blends in with the surroundings. In a city like Charleston or New Orleans, “you’re not trying to blend with organic elements as much,” says Wilbourne, so you can have some fun with color, within the confines of the cities’ individual historic regulations, of course.

Account for the Climate

Weather patterns generally influence siding material selection to a greater effect than specific color decisions. However, it is worth considering the pros and cons of light vs. dark hues in certain climates. Dark, saturated hues can fade in the sun and generally require more upkeep. They also absorb more heat and may make your home slightly more difficult to cool in sunnier and hotter destinations along the coast. On the flipside, a crisp white might provide too much contrast in a verdant mountain landscape, detracting from the natural beauty that drew you to the spot in the first place.

Streamline Decision-Making Process

River Place Cottage, Plan #1959 — Southern Living

Collect Visual Representations of All Exterior Materials

Architects, builders, and designers agree that assembling physical samples of all of the exterior building materials and paint colors in one place can help ensure your choices result in a cohesive look. Misso takes that advice one step further: “Don’t just take one piece of stone or cedar siding or one little paint chip and hold it up on site,” she says. “Have your builder do a mockup of the facade so you can truly see what all of those materials look like together.” As the materials are already on site, it generally won’t add a line item to your budget. Computer generated renderings are also helpful tools, but even they can’t match seeing the real thing in actual sunlight.

Test Samples Extensively

When it comes to trying out various exterior paint colors, apply large samples of the siding and trim candidates on each side of your actual home, says Misso: “Look at [the colors] at morning, noon, and night. Take stock of how the light is affecting the tone and pigment of the paint. You really want to make sure your choice looks good in all three lights. When it’s done poorly, in my opinion, it really is on an epic scale.”

Explore Siding Options

Exterior of farmhouse with large porch and yard — The exterior required a refresh. âWe loved the look of the house, but it didnât have insulation and some of the wood was rotten,â says Caroline. They replaced the siding and painted it Benjamin Mooreâs Simply White (OC-117) to maintain the classic farmhouse facade. Keeping the green metal roof was a no-brainer. âI couldnât imagine it any other way!â she says.
Alison Gootee

Vinyl

It’s an extremely cost effective siding material, but one of vinyl’s biggest drawbacks is the limited number of colors manufacturers offer. For decades, painting vinyl presented a litany of challenges, but paint companies like Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams have made significant strides in the category and now offer hundreds of vinyl-safe colors that resist fading and peeling—even a few darker hues, which were generally a vinyl no-no. Despite those advancements, experts still agree that lighter colors perform better on vinyl siding.

Wood

Though not without its drawbacks (re: maintenance and durability, especially in harsh climates), wood siding is a particularly versatile building material when it comes to style and color options, and depending on the type of wood, it can be stained, painted (almost any hue), or left to weather naturally. If you encounter any color limitations, it’s likely from a neighborhood association or architectural review board.

Fiber Cement

If you mention you’re in the fiber cement market, James Hardie is often the first name mentioned by builders and architects. An industry leader, the U.S. company offers traditional planks, shingles, vertical panels, and a collection of extra-thick artisan planks made from the durable wood alternative. And with the exception of the artisan collection, which is only sold primed for paint, all Hardie fiber cements products are offered primed or ready for an on-site, custom paint job or factory painted in one of Hardie’s 600+ handpicked colors.