There is no single correct way to proceed when choosing colors for multiple buildings on one site. It’s more about your individual taste and the function of the buildings. But take care the colors shouldn’t fight one another.
Just down the street, less than a half country mile away, a beautiful complex of 3 buildings comprises the now defunct Little Ghent Farm. Recently the original owners departed and it’s just a private home now consisting of a house perched on a hill, a drive through barn set into a berm and a commercial kitchen with country store. Each building is made from reclaimed barn wood, black stained vertical siding and a black metal roof.
And so it went, the decision to create identical looks for 3 buildings with different purposes. That’s the question when you’re trying to decide exterior color for multi building homes. The same? Or different?
Last month I was honored to be interviewed in the award winning Podcast “Cidiot” about life in the Hudson Valley after coming from the city. In it I was asked about country colors and one of the first topics we hit, after discussing why barns are red, was how to color outbuildings. There are options. You can hear the podcast here.”
Where I live in Columbia County NY, nestled between the Berkshire Mountains of Western MA to the east and the Hudson River and Catskills to the west, it’s all about country life. The area is populated by people here for generations as well as newcomers, usually from NYC. No matter what kind of tenure one might have, many own property that was once a farm and they have many outbuildings. Most typical is a detached garage, a barn (or ten), a shed and/or a pool house. But even if you’re located in the suburbs or exurbs, having a detached garage or shed is very common.
Matching the outbuilding to the main house.
The easiest, no fail solution is to paint your outbuilding identical to the main house. There are no issues about whether the colors work well together or if the colors create a situation where one building overtakes the other visually. You create the ultimate in cohesion. And let’s face it, some folks like things that match!
Another still cohesive, less uniform approach is to use all or some of the same colors on each building but to change the positioning. Often this is a matter of reversing the field/body color with the trim color(s). For instance, a black house with grey trim and grey garage with black trim. It’s a tightly coordinated look. If the main home has more than 2 colors it creates a more complex overall look.
How close the buildings are should affect your decision. If the buildings are quite far apart you’ve got more leeway to disconnect the colors…… somewhat. I had a client that lived in a vintage eyebrow colonial with a metal roof. She wanted the home to be a sedate neutral. We chose taupe with white trim. But she had dreamed of a blue barn ever since she was a kid and the barn was not in very close proximity. This gave us the freedom to choose colors quite unrelated to one another, though they didn’t clash. Certainly if you’re choosing two very different hues it’s better that one is more quiet (listen to our podcast about neutral colors here) so they don’t create too much color commotion together. Here, the metal roofs and white trim tie their design together.
Use your trim color to tie them together when choosing paint color for outbuildings.
Making one building a sedate neutral when you want to be more colorful elsewhere was the route we took below. This addition (which is attached) employs the same color trim as the original home, newly light green. The near black stain used on the barn-like great room announces the importance of this room and the cream trim keeps it tied to the rest of the house. There are so many ways to go!
Iconic paint colors for house and barn.
And then there’s the classics. The white farm house with its red barn. Here we use color to mark the function of the buildings and we all understand what these colors mean!
