We’ll probably never see the bright colors of homes along Italy’s sunny Amalfi Coast coming to America. Nor will we ever enter the worlds of sunshine and vivid color found in many homes as near to us as the Caribbean Islands or as far away as Lebanon and Tel Aviv. But, even with plenty of exterior home colors to choose from or to custom create ourselves, when it comes to painting the house structure or choosing a standard or custom color for a metal roof, most American homeowners tend to keep it simple.
Very little has changed since the last time we surveyed what colors our customers were choosing when they installed one of our standing seam metal roofs. Same with the big American paint companies whose customers are just now applying the 2015 exterior house paint colors recommended this year.
The fact of the matter is American color choices are pretty dull. Light, warm grays, honeyed yellow and a muted orange here and there are about as exciting as it gets on home exteriors. In the Southwest, an occasional terra cotta roof pops up—but that’s it. And in the American South in places like Florida where you thought you might see a hint of color, the big paint pushers talk of sun-washed tones mixed with avocado greens and dark blues.
Despite this malaise of color, American roofing material manufacturers offer a wide range of roofing hues.
This year we decided to do another survey, much like the one we did two years ago in an effort to determine the most popular residential metal roofing colors selected by homeowners and architects.
Below are the top ten residential, metal roofing colors from our survey in 2013…
1) Charcoal Grey
2) Forest Green
3) Dark Bronze
4) Hartford Green
5) Matte Black
6) Slate Grey
7) Mansard Brown
8) Bone White
9) Medium Bronze
10) Colonial Red
This year, the top ten most popular residential metal roofing colors were…
1) Dark Bronze
2) Charcoal Grey
3) Forest Green
4) Matte Black
5) Slate Grey
6) Hartford Green
7) Patina Green
8) Medium Bronze
9) Mansard Brown
10) Bone White
As you can see there hasn’t been an overwhelming change in metal roof color preferences since 2013. Many of the “fun” colors like Terra Cotta, Pacific Blue, Sierra Tan, Burgundy and Champagne didn’t even make our top ten.
Like we said the last time we conducted this research, you can lead the American homeowner to the paint can but you can’t make them choose an exciting color. What Americans see as curb appeal, appears to be, at least for the foreseeable future, green, gray, brown or black.
Let us know what you think? If you are designing homes with bright exciting colors please feel free to weigh in and tell us what colors you’ve been using.