If you were lucky enough to buy a home with a mid-toned neutral gray roof you’re a winner! If you were smart enough to choose that color roof, hats off to you. A neutral gray roof that doesn’t skew warm or cool leaves you endless possibilities for house paint color. In that scenario, the biggest factor that affects its appearance is how light or dark it is. Mid-toned offers you the most flexibility. Though your roof and house likely won’t clash with a gray color roof, if your roof is very dark and house light, or vice versa, you might create more contrast than is appealing. But if your roof is green, brown or red, your house color becomes a trickier decision. Choosing exterior paint colors for a green roof, brown roof or red roof is an art form but you can learn it.

Paint Colors for a Green Roof

Let’s start with whether you like your green roof. Do you want to show it off or minimize its impact? That will affect what paint color you should choose for the siding. Using a bit of color theory here, you can go across the color wheel to green’s complement, red, to create a look that’s sizzles with vibrancy.

If you want to minimize the green’s impact choose a similar color for the body of the house.

On the other hand, you can go very neutral with the house color, like a white. A white like Benjamin Moore’s White Dove or Sherwin-Williams White Flour would work well. This can look really lovely if your green roof is a nice one, especially if you repeat a green elsewhere on the house so the roof and house body colors connect. 

A soft earth toned house color melds beautifully with the green roof as the palette comes straight out of nature.

There are many earthy tones in Benjamin Moore’s Historical collection (HC) that would be lovely. Ones which skew gold like Shelburne Buff or even greenish like Gettysburg Gray work well with a green roof as does Sherwin-Williams’ ever so popular, Agreeable Gray. Though cool grays will work, warm grays work better.

A brown house, be it painted, logs, natural cedar shingles (though those will fade gray) or wood stain siding is great with a green roof.

Paint Colors for a Brown Roof

Brown roofs work well with brown or tan siding colors as long as the browns don’t clash as some browns are more yellow based and others more red based.

Here’s a reddish-brown roof with a dark brown house. The red window sashes pick up the red in the roof for a seamless interaction.

Brown roofs also play very nicely with many earth tones like warm gray, taupe, mushroom and tan as long as you’re mindful of the color family of the two.

Surprisingly a slate blue gray pairs really well with some brown roofs as with this Tudor home.

Never underestimate the versatility of an off-white, cream or white house. Here it works so well with a brown roof.

Red Roof House Paint Colors

Exterior paint colors for a red roof house can be tricky, especially is it’s a red metal roof as associations with Pizza Hut come to mind. But remember what we’ve reviewed before. If you want the roof color to be minimized choose similar colors for the body. A red for the house may be too much color all over but a reddish brown will tone down that red roof. Beyond that many colors work. Again, earth tones, olive, sage and other greens, grays -both warm and cool, and blues all work well. Below is Nicholson Green.

 

Navy can be smashing! Hale Navy, a crowd pleaser from Benjamin Moore would go well.

Lighter blue works with red too.

If the red is really vibrant makes sure to tone down the house color by making it darker, paler or muted with gray.