The Vary Best Colors
One couple's methods for creating a period paint scheme can work for many old houses.
 |
Today the house sports a polychrome paint scheme that enhances, rather than downplays, the architecture. Though consistent with late 19th-century thinking, the colors and placement are unique and a satisfying expression of the owners' aesthetics.
Photo Courtesy of Andy Olenick
|
By Steve Jordan
Choosing a new exterior paint color scheme can be a challenge. Get it right and you'll grin with pride every time you arrive home. Get it wrong and you'll regret your decisions until they're repainted to your satisfaction. The real problem, of course, is, there's no true right or wrong.
Influenced by centuries of aesthetics and seconds of whim, color choices are subjective. The options get even more intimidating with old houses. Should paint schemes be historically correct? Can you stay within your favorite color palette? Is it worth following a maven's latest predictions? Does the house's style, neighborhood, and region of the country matter? The more you think about exterior color schemes, it's easy to understand why so many houses all around us are painted in a neutral, bland, and safe manner.
If you face painting an old house exterior, there's no reason to settle for a "canned" or "dumbed-down" color combination. With a little thought and homework, there are ways to come up with a paint scheme that satisfies both the architecture of the house and your personal tastes. One approach is to get help from the many tools now available for making these design decisions. Another is to follow some of the steps Jan Barber and Doug Baker of upstate New York explored when they began thinking about painting their 1885, high-style Queen Anne house.
Thinking outside the Color Box
Jan and Doug's home is known as the Vary House because it was built by William L. Vary as a wedding present for his son. The house is one of several architectural gems—in styles from the Federal, Greek Revival, and Gothic Revival to the Italianate—in the historic village of Lima, roughly halfway between western New York's Finger Lakes region and Lake Ontario.
Eager to get started on the right foot, Doug and Jan began by studying the few authoritative books and journals written about paint colors. "Begin with the body—the majority wall color," was a common caveat, "and then pick corresponding trim colors." Good advice, but not quite enough—especially when your house boasts a double oriel, barge boards, sunbursts, spindles, wheel brackets, newels, and crannies. Doug and Jan also skimmed piles of historic paint-color charts and reproduction house-pattern books to learn the theories behind historic color choices for window sash, doors, porch ceilings, and subtle-to-contrasting trim palettes. All were sound points of reference, but they still fell short of the needs of a complex house and owners with informed tastes.
After completing major repairs on the house, while tolerating years of the former owner's bland creams and whites, they knew it was time to reveal the building's outstanding architectural character and myriad details with a powerful color scheme. Though they appreciated historically accurate paint schemes, Doug and Jan weren't interested in a perfect reproduction of the original colors or a studious interpretation. At the same time they didn't want a fanciful "painted lady" approach that would highlight details through gaudy colors and striking contrast.
Colorful Help from Some Friends
There are many ways to pick exterior paint colors. The easy route is to stick with one of the many combinations of colors provided in brochures at your local paint store. Used as recommended, or tweaked to make them your own, these are usually safe bets, albeit mundane. For folks with color phobias or mental blocks, it's easier to hire a color consultant. Most metropolitan areas have consultants and designers that will work with homeowners to pick colors. Nationally, there are also well-known consultants that, when provided with photographs of your house and your likes and dislikes, will provide color schemes. The latest addition to the arsenal is computer software developed by paint manufacturers. After loading a photograph of your house onto a computer, this software allows colors from the manufacturer's palette to be pasted onto the various elements of the house, creating a glimpse of the finished product. Check out www.architecture.about.com/cs/paint/tp/paintsoftware.htm for a few of the inexpensive paint- selection software programs.
Jan and Doug began designing their paint scheme with only a vague idea of the original body and trim color and a few basic color preferences. Doug created color samples using his own pigments and tweaking sample quarts to accommodate his taste and the other colors in the palette. Slowly and methodically, he prepared an array of potential colors: stripes spread across pieces of cardboard that could be mixed and shuffled in a search for the perfect hand. Eventually, he and Jan chose a combination of late Victorian and Arts & Crafts colors that was compatible with the house, its time period, and the teak brown roof shingles that had been installed a few years earlier. Both of them preferred an olive green for the body color. The rest of the colors evolved from this choice—mostly subtle gradations of the main palette, saving a playful, cobalt blue for the unusual elements. White was totally eliminated from the scheme.
From Paper to Paint to Placement
With a basic palette of colors set in place, they photographed all the sides and details of the house to help Doug sketch the building and its parts in black and white. After photocopying these sketches, Doug and Jan used colored pencils in the approximate paint colors to create various color schemes. Trial color combinations and placements were reversed or substituted. For example, terra cotta could replace mustard on the upper body or blue grey could substitute for dark green on the shingles. When the plan began to jell, Doug took the samples to the paint store and had quarts mixed in each color.
The porches had already been turned into test labs for various color combinations, so the new colors were tried out on other areas of the house. The idea of a two-color, double-body treatment for the first and second storeys came late in this phase. Initially, Doug wanted a bright mustard color on the upper body while Jan favored a subdued ochre. They worked together selecting colors, spending many winter hours observing them in natural light to make sure they understood every nuance as it would appear outside. This process could have lasted indefinitely. However, once the painting contract was signed, Jan and Doug finalized their color selections over a two-month period (along with help from this writer) so the painting could start in the spring.
Finally Jan and Doug narrowed their choices to nine colors. Depending on the surface and areas painted, the paint sheens varied from matte to high gloss to create more vitality in the scheme and to highlight certain elements. They also enhanced details through the clever use of subtle color variations, such as the two similar reds on the porch railings, and color opposites, such as the cobalt blue moulding between the brown roof and red fascia.
Though their color choices were ultimately personal, the harmonious scheme behind them has its roots in historic color theory. The ideas of "harmony by analogy" and "harmony by contrast" were proposed in the mid-19th century by David Hay of Edinburgh, Scotland, and taken to heart during the Victorian era. Harmony by analogy might be achieved by using colors close to one another on the color wheel—olive green and ochre, for instance (see sidebar opposite). A good example of harmony by contrast would be the use of red with green.
With nine different colors and many details to paint, Doug wanted to avoid confusion, so before the painters arrived he renamed all the paint selections and prepared 4?x 6? color swatches coded to photos and sketches. He also color-coded paint lids to prevent placement errors.
The painters chose to finish one side of the house at a time. As the work progressed, the Vary House took on a new character, as if a new house had been erected on the site. Assuming that such a well-tailored paint scheme was beyond the work of homeowners, some passersby commented, "Boy, the painters picked great colors, didn't they?" Other neighbors discovered elements they had never seen before, and a few speculated that new ornaments had been added prior to painting. Doug and Jan are very pleased with their "new" house and feel that the reinvented paint scheme rescues the lively character that was hidden by cream and white. Any way you look at it, the Vary House has undergone a startling makeover, and is well on its way to another century of splendor.
Historic Color Trends
About the time the Vary House was built in 1885, exterior paint colors had evolved from the whites of the late Federal period to the drab earth tones espoused in the 1850s by A. J. Downing and his converts to the rich, dark colors so often attributed to late- Victorian architecture. Residential architecture from about 1870 until 1900 abounds with complex combinations of styles, details, and materials-all made practical and affordable by the new woodworking machinery of the Industrial Revolution. It is not uncommon to see at least five different types of siding between foundation and roof on a fancy Queen Anne house. In the same way, the new, manufactured paint-in-a-can in standardized colors, as well as a deeper understanding of the physics behind color, helped foster a fashion for multiple color combinations. Often called polychromy, placement of these colors was used to highlight and diminish building elements and textures. Furthering this concept were colorfully stained wood shingles, painted metal, and polychrome slate roofs. Colored masonry mortars and even bright canvas awnings completed the picture. By modern standards, various Victorian color schemes can be complex and beautiful or just plain gaudy.
The Arts & Crafts Movement began at the tail end of the 19th century as a reaction to the excesses of Victorian architecture. While Victorians reveled in the use of novel materials and gimmicks made possible by the Industrial Revolution, Arts & Crafts devotees stressed the importance of fine craftsmanship—especially handwork—and harmony with the natural environment. The shift in color preferences was not really drastic but rather a lightening of the dark colors that had become unpopular. For example, dark olives were lightened to sage greens; dark ochres evolved into colors resembling Dijon mustard. All things Arts & Crafts are now more popular than they've been since their inception. Paint manufacturers offer Arts & Crafts color brochures and books have been published to help homeowners understand and choose an Arts & Crafts palette. |
|
Project Particulars
|
Painters | Steve Worboys, assisted by brothers Paul and Stan |
Paint | Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore |
Paint system | Oil primer, 100 percent acrylic top coats |
Color-scheme body | Medium Olive and Mustard, low luster |
Wood shingles | Dark Olive Green, matte, used in other areas
in gloss |
Trim | Copper Red and Dark Red (purplish), high gloss |
Sash & storms | Black Green, high gloss |
Porch ceilings | Blue (darker than sky blue), low luster |
Porch floor and steps | Medium Tan, high gloss (polyurethane) |
Porch handrails | Dark Red, high gloss |
Decorative rod moulding | Cobalt blue, high gloss |
Decorative ornaments | Cobalt Blue, Mustard, Copper Red, Dark Red, Medium Olive |
Doors
| Dark Olive Green, high gloss
| |
|
 |
Antiquity Period Designs, Ltd.
(262) 646-4911
www.antiquity-furniture.com
Benjamin Moore & Co.
(800) 826-2623
www.benjaminmoore.com
Cabot
(800) 877-8246
www.cabotstain.com
California Paints
(800) 225-1141
www.californiapaints.com
Cohasset Colonials
(800) 288-2389
www.cohassetcolonials.com
Farrow & Ball
www.farrow-ball.com
Fine Paints of Europe
(800) 332-1556
www.finepaints.com
Finnaren & Haley
(610) 825-1900
The Glidden Co.
(800) 221-4100
Johnson Paint Co.
(617) 536-4838
Milk Paint
(978) 448-6336
www.milkpaint.com
New England Traditions
(800) 878-0029
www.newenglandtraditions.com
Old Village Paint Ltd.
(800) 498-7687
www.old-village.com
PPG Architectural Finishes
(800) 441-9695
www.olympic.com
Pratt & Lambert Paints
(800) 289-7728
www.prattandlambert.com
Sydney Harbour Paint Co.
(818) 623-9394
www.porters.com.au
Zissner
(800) 245-9265
www.zircon.com
|
|
|
