Dark colors, as well as warm, earthy, and vibrant colors can be used to create a modern look on the exterior of your house.
The modern design style moves away from overly-intricate and over-the-top designs, to embrace more natural, straightforward designs in all aspects of design. Modern designs are uncomplicated and are primarily focused on function and practicality.
In light of this, it can be difficult to know which exterior house colors you can use to give your house this modern and clean look and feeling.
For this reason, you should select a few different modern colors, that way you can use these colors as the main, secondary, and accent colors on the exterior of your home to accentuate the clean lines and shapes that most modern designs are built on.
A modern color scheme on the exterior of your home should not only accentuate clean lines, but it should also blend together cohesively and mimic natural elements.
This will capture the outdoor-living feeling, and it will also help you emulate the appearance of natural materials on the exterior of your house.
Fortunately, there are many darker black, gray and charcoal, warm neutral, and vibrant colors that can be used on the exterior of a home to create or emphasize a modern look.
The modern design style
The modern architectural style emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, as a way for designers to step away from the traditional design styles that were prevalent at the time.
This emergence meant that designers, artists, architects, and other similar professions were moving away from the elaborate and detailed aesthetic of traditional design styles.
As a direct juxtaposition to the older design styles of the past, the designers who championed the modern style focused on simple forms and functionality. This is why, to this day, you can spot a modern-style home by its simplistic clean lines and bold shapes.
Some of these features include low roofs with large overhangs, a prevalence of large windows and glass panes, open-floor plans, asymmetrical elements, and the use of modern, industrial materials, such as wood, brick, and stone in clean and simplistic forms and structures.
This sentiment was also present in other areas of modern design, like the interior design and graphic design disciplines, as designs were simplified in order for form to follow function.
The prominence of the use of natural materials and prints in their raw and natural form or big, rounded, simple shapes also flowed into other areas of design that are outside of the architecture of buildings.
Modern exterior house colors
Whether you have a modern-style home with modern architecture, or you are updating an older, more traditional style of house to look more modern, there are plenty of trendy and modern exterior paint colors to choose from that can give your house that modern flair.
Even though selecting a trendy paint color can help freshen up and update the exterior of your house, it is also important to take into account that trends change over time, so it is best to consider a range of factors to find the right color for the exterior of your modern house.
One of the most important considerations when it comes to the exterior color of your house is what the area around your house looks like.
Looking at the colors that the other houses in your neighborhood have used for their exteriors will not only give you inspiration for your own color scheme, but will help you get a sense of the general look that fits well in your area.
It is also always a good idea to consider natural elements when you are selecting an exterior color scheme, such as things like trees, grass, shrubs, wooden decks, and more, are all visible on the outside of your house, so you need to ensure that your house’s exterior color does not clash with this natural color ‘scheme’, of sorts.
Fortunately, modern exterior house colors tend to embrace natural and earthy shades that should harmonize easily with these natural outdoor elements.
When you are choosing paint colors for the exterior of your home, it is a good idea to consider choosing a few colors that work well together. This is because the exterior of a house often comprises many elements that need to be painted.
Your color range should include a main color that will be used on the largest surface areas of the exterior of your home, a color for the rim and siding, and a third color that will serve as an accent color to break up the elements on the outside of your home.
Some of the best examples of modern exterior house colors are deep, rich colors like black, gray, and charcoal shades, which make a statement, but echo some of the earthy outdoor tones.
In this same vein, warm, soft, earthy tones like sand beige and tan also mimic natural stone and desert elements and make excellent exterior colors for modern homes if the darker colors do not suit your style or your neighborhood.
As far as accent colors go, there are several earthy, but vibrant modern color choices that can help you add a splash of color to your house’s exterior, but that will still keep the same clean, simplistic look and feel that the modern style is known for.
Modern black, gray, and charcoal exterior house colors
A modern exterior color scheme that utilizes big sections of highly saturated black, dark gray, or charcoal paint is a really trendy option that will make quite a statement, like in the example below.
If you choose one of these darker statement colors as the main color for your house, it is important that you consider the undertones in your color, since warm undertones work best to recreate that earthy, natural look that modern designs have.
If you are planning to apply such a deep, saturated color to an exterior surface, it is crucial that you choose a suitable paint for the surface you are painting, such as brick, wooden siding, or stone, so that you can ensure that the color looks opaque in just a few coats.
This Prestige Paints Exterior Paint and Primer In One in the color MQ5-5-PCM, strikes the perfect balance between being a dark, yet warm, and deep color.
The paint also has a thick consistency, which means that you only need a few coats to completely cover your exterior surfaces.
If the bold look of such a dark color on large surfaces or the exterior of your home is not your style, you can recreate this same look by adding just a small touch of black, gray, or charcoal paint to your front door.
This Modern Masters Elegant Front Door Paint is specifically designed to be used on front doors, and when paired with creamy white colors, it can help you create a typically modern color design scheme for the exterior of your home.
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Modern, warm, and earthy exterior house colors
Warm and earthy neutral shades are also good color choices for the exterior of a modern house. These colors tend to make less of a statement than the darker shades, but they can be just as striking when used correctly, as seen in the example below.
Colors that mimic natural elements like sand, linen, clay, and stone are good alternatives to other bright colors like white and off-white colors, for the exterior of a house, because they do not look nearly as stark or blinding in natural daylight.
These colors will also make your house feel like it blends into its surroundings in a natural and seamless way, which will give your home’s exterior a modern aesthetic.
This Montage Signature Interior/Exterior Eco-Friendly Paint has a variety of warm neutral color shades, like Desert Tan, Navajo White, Patina, and Swiss Coffee.
These colors will help you capture this bright and earthy, but subdued and natural appearance. These colors also pair well with accents of the darer black and charcoal colors mentioned above.
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Modern vibrant exterior house colors
If you want to find an accent color for your house that displays more personality than a neutral or dark shade does, a modern pop of color may be just the right choice.
The wide variety of colors in this category can make it especially difficult to determine which colors will help you maintain a clean, natural, modern exterior color scheme, since there are so many colors to choose from.
However, if you stick with colors that fall into the Mid-Century Modern color scheme, like the example below, you will be able to add splashes of navy, mustard, and even gray-blue colors to the exterior of your house, without making these colors look out of place from the rest of your house’s design and the outdoors.
Mustard and gray-blues are good choices for a modern and vibrant exterior house color, and these SW6377-PCM and SW6791-PCM shades in the Prestige Paints Exterior Paint and Primer in One paint, mimic Sherwin-Williams’s Butterscotch and Lauren’s Surprise shades as the perfect pop of color in a Mid-Century, modern color scheme.
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