The Process of Choosing Exterior Materials for Your Custom Home
Building your custom home is an exciting experience—especially when it comes to choosing your exterior materials.
For Springhouse, there are two points in our entire architectural design process where we deal with selecting exterior materials. The first is during the initial concept meeting, before we put anything on paper. During this time, we’ll talk about materiality, and browse some inspiration to see what the client likes and dislikes: What’s your style? What’s your aesthetic? How many different patterns do you like? What kind of color palette are you attracted to? Although we're not choosing materials at this point, it’s important for us to establish some aesthetic boundaries to navigate where we're going. This also helps the architect decipher how many materials they’ll need, how to design floor plans, and how to balance different textures and colors.
During the initial meeting, we also discuss longevity and maintenance of your exterior materials. As you can imagine, most people desire something low maintenance—so, we review the different materials that fit that need without sacrificing their aesthetic. Maybe the bulk of their materials are lower maintenance, with the exception of one being a little higher. That being said, a small percentage of clients aren’t concerned about the maintenance, and don’t mind hiring someone to paint or caulk their entire home every seven years. Ultimately, it’s a difference in personality, goals, and desired aesthetic.
The second time we meet to discuss exterior materials is when we’re finished with construction documents and need to select the actual materials and colors. This is such a fun process, but there are some rules to consider:
Rule #1: Always Start with Natural Materials
Here at Springhouse, our number-one rule for selecting exterior materials is to always start with natural materials. First, you want to choose your stone—even if you’re using faux stone—because of the many color variations. If you’re using local, natural stone, we will go to the actual stone quarry and choose your stone. There are other options from all over the country. That will entail selecting from a catalog and getting samples shipped. From there, we’ll choose all of the other materials in relation to the stone. The reason we do this is because the natural materials come from the earth, and we can’t change the color to match the other materials. However, we can change the other materials to match the natural material.
Another natural exterior material would be a wood product. We especially love eco-friendly, thermally treated wood products because they’re long-lasting, low-maintenance, and you don’t need to stain them.
Rule #2: Choose Prefinished Materials with Color
After choosing the natural materials, we move into any materials where the color is integral to the product—whether prefinished siding, windows or any prefinished cement sidings with paint color embedded. During this process, you’ll want to obtain any physical samples with standard colors, which will be shipped to you.
Rule #3: Select Your Roof
Choosing your roof is a fairly easy process. All in all, you’re either choosing black, green, brown, or weathered wood. Unless the roof is a major design element for you, don’t worry too much about the details of this selection. That being said, we like to prioritize the decision early on.
Rule #4: Paint, Stain, Accent Colors & Gutters
The last choice for exterior materials involves the selection of paint color, stain color, accent colors, and gutters. This will apply to your trim, soffit, facia, and garage doors (garage doors often come in prefinished colors, but they can also be painted). Since gutters come in prefinished colors, the choice should be easy once you land on a trim color. You choose all of these together in accordance with the other exterior choices you’ve made thus far—your natural materials, windows, prefinished siding, etc.
Overall, this is our entire process for exterior material selection during the design phase. Our recommendation? Don't skip the hard work of getting samples and thinking through different options. You'll be so excited about the installation and seeing it come to life!
Have any questions?
Although we covered a lot in this post, you may still have some other questions about choosing exterior materials. Whether you’re involved in the custom home process now, or even just considering it, join our free Facebook group—we’ll help you answer any questions you might have! Also, feel free to invite anyone that you think would benefit from this collaborative. You’ll not only get advice from me, but from other people who have been through this, too.
Start the process.
When it comes to designing and building a custom home, nothing beats having a trusted, experienced team of architects on your side. Let’s set up a call to meet, discuss your goals, answer your questions, and settle your fears. We can’t wait to meet you!