Roof color – the #1 consideration in choosing an exterior paint color

Did you ever see an otherwise beautiful home that just looked “off?” Often, this is because the roof and exterior paint colors clash.

Roof color matters when choosing an exterior paint color for your home.  Here’s why:

Your roof is a permanent fixture on your home’s exterior, so it’s essential to incorporate its color and its undertones into your exterior color scheme.

Until you look carefully at the hues of your roof’s shingles, you may not even realize that your roof contains so many different colors. Choosing one or two of those undertones to blend well with your exterior paint color is crucial to a cohesive exterior look and great curb appeal.

Start here:  Is your roof color warm or cool?

Start by determining if your asphalt roof has a warm or cool undertone. While we tend to think of gray as a cool color, there are many warm gray tones, so look at your roof carefully.

Look for colors and undertones in your asphalt roof’s shingles.

If you look closely, you can often see green, blue, rose, and even purple within the specks of your roof’s shingles. Use these specks and undertones to inform your decision on where to start with your paint color selection.

Once you’ve decided if the undertones are warm or cool, start with paint colors with those same undertones.

Have a cedar roof?  Choose a neutral color:

While many wood-cedar shingled roofs on the South Shore start warm in tone when they’re first installed, they can then gray or weather to a cooler tone. Consider choosing a neutral exterior color for your cedar-roofed home to avoid having the paint color clash with the cedar roof as it weathers over time.

Neutral Colors are neither warm nor cool and result from combining two complementary colors from the color wheel (think about the brown that results from combining red and green).

Neutral paint colors for your exterior include shades of white, gray, brown, and black. Our free in-home designer can help.

Exterior paint colors for homes with metal roofs:

Because metal roofs are so durable, if you are replacing your roof with a metal roof, choose a roof color that you’ll like for years to come.  You can then choose an exterior paint color to match the coolness or the warmness of your metal roof color.

When replacing your roof with any type of roof, it’s best to do so before painting. This way, everything that affects the roof’s color (lighting, direction your home faces, etc.) can be considered when choosing an exterior paint color.

Also, because metal roofs tend to be solid in color (and not have the same variation and “colored flecks” as a standard asphalt roof), once the solid color metal roof is installed, many exterior paint colors can be easily eliminated just by looking at them.

Choosing an exterior color to match a roof with solar panels.

If you have solar panels installed on your roof, consider the color tones of your solar panels when choosing an exterior paint color.

Solar panels tend to be dark and cool, so check your solar panels carefully before choosing an exterior paint color.  For better curb appeal, some of our customers work with our free color consultant to choose exterior colors that help downplay the solar panels and shift your eyes to the beauty of their home’s architecture.

Even the white paint you choose matters.

Even white paints come in warm and cool tones, so don’t rush your color selection by thinking, “I’m only painting my home white, so roof color shouldn’t matter” – it still does.

Consider warm white like Sherwin Williams’ Origami White if your roof is warmer. If your roof has cooler tones, look for exterior paint in a cooler white like Sherwin Williams’ Whitetail when selecting your final exterior white paint color.

To illustrate a roof’s impact on exterior paint color selection, let’s look at some examples: