@hotspaceexteriordesignau Finally finished! Before & After 90's home renovation. #exteriorrenovation #renovation #colour #renovationproject #exteriordesign #homeimprovement #exteriordesigner #homemakeover #federation ♬ original sound – HotspaceExteriorDesignAU
If you’ve read some of my previous articles about doing up the façade of your house, you probably recognize there is more to creating a beautiful façade than just choosing the right colours. By now, you would understand the importance of creating a focal point and achieving cohesion and balance through the entire design. But there’s another step in the design process that all designers understand and use and that is the notion of a house being masculine or feminine in appearance. Although it’s not as widely known in the general population, it’s something that could help you create a more effective design for your façade.
Masculine and feminine design are pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum. A masculine design is generally darker colours, stronger lines, more structured landscaping and often a squarer, more angular or chunky effect. Feminine design is softer colours, more curves, softer landscaping and usually a more fluid appearance.
Of course, some houses have a mixture of both, but often a house can be far more feminine or quite obviously masculine. It’s useful to grasp this concept before you start redoing the façade because it can help inform almost all your decisions. It will have a bearing on paint colour, materials used, and the type of landscaping you do.
A beautiful façade has depth, contrast, and visual interest. It’s not a flat look with everything on the same plane and painted in the same colour. Identifying whether your house is more masculine or feminine in appearance will help you work out how to balance it and use contrast to achieve a more visually interesting façade.
If what you’ve got on your facade is not working, think of the opposite (in terms of masculine or feminine) and consider adding in those features to balance it out. If it’s too masculine, add in the feminine and vice versa.
For example, if your house is a big brick 80s house, it’s probably quite masculine. It’s likely to be angular, chunky, very structured and could be lacking personality because it’s one big solid mass with not much to visually break it up. To balance that, you could add softness. You might render it to add contrast through colour, but more importantly, you could look at the shapes and give it some softness through softer landscaping, more fluid lines, and using more natural materials.
If your house is too feminine, too soft and airy-fairy, you could add more structure and depth through darker colours, stronger lines and landscaping. You would aim to make it less fluid and more entrenched or solid in appearance.
If you have trouble identifying where your house lies on the spectrum, or you need a bit of help in achieving a balanced design for the façade, consider hiring an exterior designer. A good one is worth their weight in gold, usually far less expensive than you think and will help you avoid costly mistakes.
…don’t be mad when you hear my answer!
Hello. Good afternoon. How is everyone? My name is Jane Eyles-Bennett, and I am the founder of this group and an exterior designer. I’m an interior designer too, but I do mainly exteriors.
So today, I said on my title I’m going to talk about what colour should you paint the exterior of your home and the reason I said don’t get mad is because I’m not going to give you my favourite colours. I am going to talk about now that when you’re choosing colours for the exterior of your home, that is only 30% of the equation. I kinda made up that percentage, but that is about what it is. It’s not the be-all and end-all. I think people think that they choose a great colour and all of a sudden, the exterior of your home is going to look amazing. And it just isn’t.
Anyone who listens to my videos, I know I’m raving on and on a bit about this. Colour is important. It’s very important to get the colour right, and as you may know when you choose a colour from a swatch that big, it’s going to look completely different on your home. So, one thing is to get your colours right. The other thing is to do other things on your renovation. You know those design principles that I often talk about. So that’s creating a focal point, creating balance, creating cohesion.
I talked to somebody yesterday who had read one of my articles on the Domain Real Estate website, which I don’t know if anyone’s read those. I might see if I can pop a link somewhere or you can see it in the normal feed within the group page. But, he’d been reading that and I’d said something in a previous article about creating balance and actually framing around your property with a fence and anyway we got talking about things, and it turns out that a really big thing for his home (and for so many others that I talk to) is that the colour is just one small aspect and you can use your colour to create those things called focal.
The things I’m referring to like a focal point, creating a visual balance, giving us that contrast. So, the colours, yes, they are important in that way, but one colour or two colours in their own right–right, choose a colour slap it on everywhere–without consideration about the composition of those colours and the composition of other things.
So maybe something like a new carport or a fence or some landscaping or balustrading or a new entrance portico or any number of things, colour of windows, all kinds of things. And you can use your colour to create those different contrasts and to give yourself a really visually interesting but also well-composed, balanced, really nice to look at I’m going to say façade because that’s mainly what I do.
I hope that’s interesting. I’m sorry I didn’t give you colours and my title was misleading, but I knew that people would listen to this and I really want to get my message out that colour is only a small part of getting your renovation right.
That’s it from me. Have a lovely weekend, and I’ll chat to you again.