I recently saw an article on Exterior colors for 1960’s Houses on Retro Renovation (the mac-daddy of mcm home blogs). Good timing because some friends/neighbors of ours have a 1960’s brick ranch that needs painted – *needs* because it’s an ugly color of carrot-orange brick! I took the initiative to mock up some color suggestions for them. The trim and gutters have recently been painted chocolate brown.
Current
Lemon Loaf Yellow
Cool Coastal Blue
Elephant At-Least-Its-Not-Beige Gray
Charcoal Taupe Gray
I’m trying to nudge them toward something besides beige/cream/vanilla/blah. Which do you like best?
(CBB)
myMCMlife.com 
Not trying to be too dull, but the bright colors don’t work. I think the charcoal taupe looks best.
Lemon Loaf Yellow is my pick, especially if they are in a different neighborhood than you as it is a little too similar to your house for it to be a neighbor.
It’s about 1/2 mile from our house … down the street and around the corner. Their next door neighbor’s house is dirty white. I definitely wouldn’t have recommended green for theirs. Although Jason and I recently discovered a house in our neighborhood that has been painted the same combination of green and gray as ours. I guess we’ll take that as a compliment!
My favorite is the elephant gray
I like the charcoal-taupe. It’s a modern facelift without being so dark that the windows seemingly disappear@
Honestly, I *like* the color of the brick as it is — at least from the photo you have on the page. I think it’s a good looking house, especially with the dark window trim. If I had to choose a color, I’d go with the charcoal taupe grey, even though that’s a little too trendy at the moment. I normally like painted brick, but I believe that brick should stay as it is.
Just discovered your blog following this past weekend’s early-May flooding in Nashville. Am so sorry for all this tragic loss! Happy that your home survived, but of course heartsick to hear about your friends’ and neighbors’ fate.
Specifically about this post on exterior paint colors: HOW do you do these excellent digital color mock-ups?? Is it directly through Photoshop or is there some specialty paint software? It could really be useful to me. Thanks.
Photoshop. I masked out the brick area, desaturated it and then apply colors to the mask area through different layers (with the Color filter)
Thanks! I have Photoshop (well, “Elements 3” anyway) and I’ll try it.
[…] thankfully (in my opinion) we also have some painted brick houses. (And we almost had one more. But then the flood swallowed it.) I’m a big fan of paint and if done right it doesn’t […]
[…] | Tags: CBB, CBB 3.0 From here on out, I’m going to refer to our friend’s house (the one needed painted, then was destroyed by a flood, then knocked down, and now has started to be rebuilt) as CBB 3.0. […]