Exterior Colors for Historic Craftsman Homes

Wood Exteriors

• Many Craftsman homes were built using wood exteriors. Today, surviving homes (California has many) could be painted in a variety of colors. Fortunately, wood is often quite easy to repaint in classic Craftsman colors. The first thing to do would be to look at the natural surroundings and try to pattern an exterior color scheme that matches. If surrounded by a lot of evergreen trees, perhaps a matching green would fit.

Brick Exteriors

• Craftsman designers and builders also used handcrafted brick or stone to cover the exteriors of their homes. In many cases, especially if the homes are from the early Craftsman era, these exteriors may already be painted, unfortunately, which can make stripping away any paint to return it to the brown or red-brown colors that dominated Craftsman brick exteriors difficult. You need to find a color, then, that can cover the old paint; brown for brown, for example.

Cedar Shingling

• Historic Craftsman homes may also be covered in their original cedar roof shingling. That particular wood was nearly always stained back then, not painted. If your shingling has already been painted over, you can't use a wood stain to bring it back to an original look. Depending on the color, you'll probably want to match up exterior wood coverings in the same palette. Just use a darker or lighter matching color to provide contrast.

Colors

• Outside of painted-over brick exteriors, using the historic color palettes already noted for repainting tends to work best. For example, a red-brown wood exterior could be offset with a darker reddish-brown trim paint. Or the home's slate gray painted cedar shingling could be set off nicely by a matching gray or even soft blue palette. If the cedar shingling is still stained in a natural color, use matching colors on the rest of the exterior.