House Color

Friday February 13, 2004 - House Color Survey

A person’s clothing usually tells the brand. The back of their car tells the make and the model. Their watch, their phone, their shoes, sunglasses, appliances, and underwear are all designed for easy brand recognition. But, what about a house? Sure there are certain architects and construction companies that bring awe and high price tags. But once the house is built and the construction signs are removed, only building permits and listing agents remember the brand.

And that holds true for paint color too. Each paint store carries its own unique selection of paint colors for your house and its trim. There are hundreds of colors from which to choose. But once the paint has dried, the scaffolding removed, and the tarps thrown back on to the paint trucks, there is nothing left to identify the color except for the rusting half-full can that gets put into the garage and becomes indistinguishable from all the other rusting half-full cans of paint that came before it.

At this Ellwood house, the trim color matches the green waste container.

This lack of color identification becomes a big problem whenever some website does a contest to see what the most common colors are. The dedicated staff of edhat.com was looking at houses and classifying their paint colors as white, tan, brown, green, blue, orange, red, or yellow. But, these colors are really only concepts, not reality. Look at the Glidden Color Chart and you will see that white is not white. It is Wood Anemone, Whisper, or Summer Butterfly. And tan is something you get when you lay out in the sun. On your house it’s called Bonjour Beige or Crème Brulee. What really makes things difficult for web site data gatherers is that the world of colors is not black and white, instead there are lots of shades of gray …and tan and brown and white.

So, the dedicated staffers, who hadn’t really thought about color combinations since Garanimals were invented, were forced to make some tough decisions. Wearing new and different hats, however, is part of the job. And, at the end (of the rainbow), we had inspected and classified over 200 houses. Overall we found the 79% of houses in the tan/white range with tan being the dominant color (46%). Tan is same color as beige which, according to the Dictionary.com thesaurus, is another word for

“anemic, arid, banal, blah, bland, characterless, colorless, commonplace, dead, drab, driveling, dry, dullsville, feeble, flat, ho hum, inane, innocuous, jejune, lifeless, limp, loser, mild, milk-and-water, mundane, namby-pamby, nebbish, nothing, nowhere, ordinary, plain, pointless, prosaic, prosy, slight, soft, spiritless, stale, stupid, subdued, tame, tedious, tenuous, thin, tired, trite, unimaginative, vapid, watery, weak, weariful, wearisome, wiped out, wishy-washy, yawn”

You get the picture.

Trim was a little more exciting with blue (21%) and brown (22%) just losing out to white (28%). Because much of the white trim was found on blue houses, and tan houses had many a wide variety of trim colors, the two most popular color combinations found were white-with-blue-trim and tan-with-brown-trim.

But combinations don’t matter because the contest was to determine the most popular color in each category. The correct answer (tan and white) was the most popular response. A random drawing selected Careered Lady as our winner. She wins a prize of her choice from our grab bag (coffee cards, movie tickets, candy coupons). Hopefully she will pick something that’s not “namby-pamby”.

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